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Computational psychiatry

Examining mental disorders with computational neuroscience

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 2, page 4 (2023)Cite this article

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In the 1940s, Norbert Wiener proposed that organic and functional mental disorders could be distinguished using a ‘computing machine’. However, in 2016 it still seemed somewhat courageous to use computational approaches to understand mental disorders and psychiatric conditions, because there was no common consensus about what these approaches could achieve. A perspective piece by Huys and colleagues changed this view, but I still vividly remember my excitement when I unexpectedly came across this paper during my internship working on cognitive flexibility in autism at a pharmaceutical company.

The term ‘computational psychiatry’ can be dated back to conference proceedings published in 2009. However, it was only with Huys and colleagues’ piece in 2016 that computational psychiatry was better considered and understood as an emerging field. Before this work, it was common for psychiatry studies that used either cognitive computational models of behaviour or modern machine learning techniques to consider themselves computational psychiatry. Huys et al. took a step further, categorizing theory-driven and data-driven computational psychiatry under the same umbrella.

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References

Original article

  • Huys, Q. J. et al. Computational psychiatry as a bridge from neuroscience to clinical applications. Nat. Neurosci. 19, 404–413 (2016)

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  • Crawley, D. et al. Modeling flexible behavior in childhood to adulthood shows age-dependent learning mechanisms and less optimal learning in autism in each age group. PLoS Biol. 18, e3000908 (2020)

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  • Geng, H. et al. Promoting computational psychiatry in China. Nat. Hum. Behav. 6, 615–617 (2022)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cognition, Emotion, and Methods in Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Lei Zhang

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  1. Lei Zhang
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Correspondence to Lei Zhang.

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Zhang, L. Examining mental disorders with computational neuroscience. Nat Rev Psychol 2, 4 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-022-00131-2

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