Seminar announcement: Franziska Knolle (Munich), 3 July 2025

Speaker: Franziska Knolle (Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Neuroradiology, Technical University of Munich, Germany).

Title: From Risk to Disorder: Decision-Making Dysfunctions in Psychosis.

Date and time: Thursday, 3 July 2025, 5pm AEST

Abstract

Alterations in decision-making are proposed to underlie several psychiatric disorders, such as psychosis. Decision-making involves integrating information about future outcomes, such as their probability, reward value, and effort cost. This process is shaped by the comparison between expected and actual outcomes, commonly described in terms of prediction errors. In psychosis, aberrant prediction error signalling is thought to bias belief formation toward unlikely or implausible outcomes, contributing to hallucinations and delusions. Additionally, impairments in decision-making have been linked to negative symptoms, particularly motivational deficits. I will present evidence for these alterations across different cohorts - from healthy adolescents with psychotic-like experiences to individuals with chronic schizophrenia - using a range of tasks, including an orthogonalised Go/No-Go task, the Two-Step task, and the Balloon Analogue Risk task combined with computational modelling. These behavioural measures offer scalable, cost-effective tools for probing mechanisms underlying psychotic symptoms.

Zoom link:

https://uni-bonn.zoom.us/j/67862809703?pwd=WHM3b3lIUFJYY2x0ekxLZUhxS3UvUT09

Meeting-ID: 678 6280 9703, Code: 193789

About the seminar series:
This seminar is part of the Bonn-Melbourne Seminar Series in Decision Neuroscience and Computational Psychiatry, jointly organised by the University of Bonn (Institute of Psychology) and the University of Melbourne (Centre for Brain, Mind and Markets).

Convenors: Professor Ulrich Ettinger (University of Bonn), Professor Carsten Murawski (University of Melbourne)

#BonnMelbourneDecisionSeminar

More Information

Elizabeth Bowman

eabowman@unimelb.edu.au