Title : Affordances vs task management: Evoking agency and addiction
Abstract:
Neural mechanisms for self regulation feature prominently in studies of addiction, which is characterized by the inability to resist compulsive behavior. Such neural mechanisms involve not just top down processes needed in the execution of decision making events, but also the neural representation of the self/agent, generally regarded as the source of decision making capacity. Impairments of this latter representation can be expected to weaken the ability to enlist capacities for self regulation. How the agent may be represented, nevertheless, has remained an enigma. General models of brain organization increasingly invoke stable networks, termed resting state networks (RSNs), which organize brain activity for the support of diverse brain functions. Much evidence now points toward their involvement in a spectrum of neurological dysfunctions and in psychiatric diseases, such as major depressive disorder autism, attention deficit/hyperactivity and schizophrenia. Hence, they are likely to be impaired in addiction abnormalities as well. Current work indicates that bodily representation is a key aspect underpinning the source of top down agent mediated events, particularly those associated with motor actions and RSNs associated with this representation could therefore be impaired in addiction. Significantly, diseases of agency like schizophrenia are known to impair bodily representation and to also affect goal directed neural correlates like those of the mirror system. This talk will explore the relationship between the broader representation needed to underpin the agent and resting network brain operation in such cognitive diseases to gain insight into how agent representation may be impaired in addiction.
