A widespread observation is that people avoid mentally effortful courses of action, and much recent work examining cognitive effort has explained subjective effort evaluation – and, consequently, pref...

Hippocampal maps and ventral prefrontal cortex (vPFC) value and goal representations support foraging in continuous spaces. How might hippocampal-vPFC interactions control the balance between behavior...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Cognitive neuroscience and clinical psychology have made substantial advances in knowledge about metacognitive processes, but these fields have progressed in parallel. In this Review, Seow et al. inte...

Internal and external selection processes can codevelop in time to yield efficient search behavior.

Birkbeck

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD), bipolar disorder (BP), and schizophrenia (SCZ) involve learning impairments with poorly understood mechanisms. Understanding both the similarities and diff...

What's on at the University of Plymouth: Autobiographical Processing and Psychopathology Conference 2026. Special interest meeting. University of...

This article illustrates the assumption of path symmetry in current theories of psychopathology and calls for the development of dynamical systems of mental illness that incorporate asymmetry.

Humans exhibit a striking tendency to persist with chosen goals. This strong attachment to goals can often appear irrational – a perspective captured by terms such as perseverance or sunk-cost biases. In this review, we explore how goal commitment could stem from several adaptive mechanisms, including those that optimise cognitive resources, shield decisions from interference, and scaffold motivation in the absence of accessible reward signals. We propose that these computational considerations have important implications for algorithmic architectures supporting decision making, including separate algorithms for goal selection and implementation, and for monitoring ongoing goals versus alternative sources of reward. Finally, we discuss how a variety of mechanisms supporting goal commitment and abandonment could relate to dimensions affected in mental health.

Child & Adolescent Translational Science Lab at Northwestern University