Heady concepts, clinical applications
The heartbeat experiments are typical of the work done by Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers in Petzschner’s lab, whose interests span cognitive science, neuroscience, computer science, math and medicine. Members of the team are running experiments at the Carney Institute nearly every day of the week.
Each session usually lasts for several hours, during which participants complete computer-based behavioral tasks — “little games,” Petzschner calls them — while their brain activity is recorded using EEG or fMRI. The team then applies computational models of learning, decision-making and perception to interpret the data.
“We try to infer from the way people play what their strategy was so that we can better understand why people make the choices they do,” she said.
The team recently studied how decision-making is altered in chronic pain. In results submitted for peer review and published in pre-print format online, they found that chronic pain can alter the decision-making process in patients. The results, Petzschner said, could explain why some patients continue to avoid certain movements or activities even after their damaged tissue has healed.
“This type of finding could ultimately help clinicians refine treatment plans for people with chronic pain — by addressing not just symptoms, but the underlying learning and decision-making processes that sustain them,” she said.
That’s what excites Petzschner about this work: the cerebral concepts she studies have real-world relevance and clinical application.
“At the university, we often study problems that can seem abstract or far removed from daily life,” she said. “But for me, the goal is always to bring those ideas back to people — to help patients live better in their own bodies. Every experiment we run is meant to move us closer to that goal.”
