Mapping Value and Motivational Salience in Addiction with Multimodal Brain Imaging
Supervisors:
Dr Joana Carvalheiro, School of Psychology & Neuroscience
Dr Filippo Queirazza, School of Health and Wellbeing
Prof Marios Philiastides, School of Psychology & Neuroscience
Summary:
Addiction is a major public health challenge with enormous health, economic, and societal costs. Yet effective interventions remain limited, partly because we lack a clear mechanistic understanding of how brain reward systems are disrupted in addiction.
We hypothesise that addictive behaviours reflect excessive salience attribution to rewards, even when they hold little value. This may explain why people persist in addictive behaviours despite diminished pleasure.
This PhD project will disentangle value (how good or bad an outcome is) from salience (how strongly it captures attention) and test how their neural dynamics vary with addiction severity. Using simultaneous EEG–fMRI—a cutting-edge neuroimaging method—we will first map these signals across the human brain. We will then determine how their timing and location shift with levels of addictive behaviours. Finally, we will relate this neural variability to other mental health dimensions of addiction, including impulsivity, sensation seeking, anxiety and depression.
The overarching goal is to identify brain mechanisms linked to addiction that provide a foundation for refining targeted interventions. The student will receive high-interdisciplinary training in multimodal neuroimaging, quantitative analysis, the neuroscience of reward and addiction, and mental health, supported by a team of experts in neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry.