Information-seeking in health and disease

Every day, people decide whether to read the news, check their phone, or ask a question—and those decisions may go awry in depression and anxiety. Psychiatrists have long suspected that patients with these conditions seek or avoid information in unusual ways, but no one has precisely measured what drives those choices or how they break down in illness. This project aims to change that. The researcher has designed tasks that isolate three specific drivers of information-seeking: whether the information is good or bad (valence), how uncertain the person is, and whether the information helps them make a useful decision. By testing healthy volunteers and people diagnosed with affective disorders, the team will determine which of these drivers is over- or under-expressed in mental illness. They will also use brain imaging and drugs that alter dopamine—a chemical that malfunctions in several psychiatric conditions—to identify the neural circuits behind these altered choices. If successful, the work could produce a quantitative behavioural test for diagnosing subtypes of depression or anxiety, and for predicting which treatment might work for a given patient. This is fundamental science: it will not immediately change clinical practice. But understanding the precise computational mechanisms that drive maladaptive information-seeking could eventually lead to targeted therapies that correct those specific biases, rather than treating symptoms broadly.