Behavior in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

People utilize two behavioral strategies, goal-directed and habitual, when engaging in value-based decision-making that involves rewarding or punishing outcomes. Accumulating evidence suggests an imbalance between habitual and goal-directed behavior in favor of habitual control in parallel with exaggerated tendency toward compulsive/harm avoidance behavior in OCD. In healthy subjects, an arbitration mechanism has been proposed recently that controls the balance between those two strategies of action selection. Arbitration regions regulate the goal-directed/habitual decision-making balance by selectively downregulating the activity of the habitual regions. This project aims to explore the neurobehavioral characteristics of arbitration mechanism and its relationship with behaviors and clinical phenotypes in OCD by applying computational cognitive neuroscience, clinical task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) method.