The Hartley Lab

One current research project in our lab leverages a developmental computational psychiatry approach (discussed in our recent review article Goldway et al., 2023, Biological Psychiatry) to understand how decision-making phenotypes relate to psychiatric symptomatology during adolescence. In a two-year longitudinal online study, we are assessing whether differentiable aspects of reinforcement learning relate to specific dimensions of transdiagnostic clinical symptoms in 1,000 10- to 25-year-olds. In a smaller laboratory sample, we are examining how variation in

computational decision-making phenotypes reflects developmental changes in structural and functional connectivity within prefrontal-subcortical circuits. Analysis of the relation between these reward learning phenotypes and symptoms at the first timepoint is currently underway. In a recent perspective piece (Nussenbaum and Hartley, 2024, Nature Reviews Psychology), we conceptualized the development of

reward learning as a “meta-learning” process through which the statistics of experienced environments over developmental timescales lead to adaptations in learning via plastic changes in underlying brain circuits. In the large longitudinal study described above, we are also testing whether variation in the reward statistics of participants’ real-world early-life environments (e.g., controllability, unpredictability, and prevalence of reward and threat) give rise to individual differences in reinforcement learning at later time points, and whether the influence of experienced

environments modulates vulnerability to psychopathology.

Another central line of research in our lab examines how the controllability of the environment influences learning and decision-making processes. In a recent study in this line of work, we showed that that while children, adolescents and adults all place intrinsic value on making agentic choices, the sensitivity of agency preferences to reward controllability increases systematically with age (Nussenbaum*, Katzman*, et al., 2024, Psychological Science). In a second recent study, we showed that use of

controllability estimates to adaptively calibrate the reliance on proactive versus reactive behavioral strategies is particularly heightened during adolescence (Raab*, Goldway* et al., 2024, Learning and Memory),

A third line of research supported by VBP funds seeks to characterize the influence of real-world behavior on emotional and mental health. Our recent work using geolocation tracking and experience sampling methods demonstrated that an increased diversity of daily experience promotes positive emotional states and that real-world exploratory behavior increases across adolescence. In two longitudinal studies building on this work, we are examining how adolescents’ mental health and

emotional well-being following life transitions (i.e., start of college; Payne et al., in prep.) and how real-world experiential diversity influences memory for positive and negative experiences in daily life (Benear et al., in progress).

Publications

Biological Psychiatry

Nature Reviews Psychology

Psychological Science

Learning & Memory