Biology subjects

Morein-Zamir, S.

Publications and source records attributed to Morein-Zamir, S..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Neurobehavioural correlates of changing one's mind in ADHD and OCD

Cognitive flexibility is an executive function that allows individuals to adjust behaviour in response to changing environmental demands. We assessed volitional switching under uncertainty, without rule-based learning, in the Change Your Mind task. Nineteen patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), 19 patients with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and matched control participants (20 per group) completed the task whilst undergoing a functional MRI scan. The task was a two-alternative forced choice paradigm where each stimulus was presented twice successively, with spurious feedback following the first presentation. This allowed participants the opportunity to repeat or change their response. Participants with ADHD changed their response more frequently than controls following a previously correct response, associated with reduced accuracy on the second trial. This was accompanied with smaller differences between change and repeat trials in the superior frontal gyrus, paracingulate gyrus and frontal pole compared to controls. Participants with OCD did not differ from healthy controls in their performance but exhibited greater activity on both change and repeat trials in the pre- and postcentral gyri than controls. These results point to distinct neurobehavioural differences in patients with ADHD and OCD underlying what is often termed more broadly inflexible behaviour.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

The silence of the rewards: Non-reward cue suppresses cue-driven behaviour in pavlovian-instrumental transfer

Flexible reward-seeking relies upon an organisms integration of expectations about environmental cues with knowledge of actions that produce rewards, which is captured by pavlovian instrumental transfer (PIT). Although widely used to study motivation across species, rodent PIT paradigms differ from human tasks in lacking an active baseline for comparison. Here we adapted the full PIT paradigm to include a non-rewarded cue (CSO) as an active control with the aim of improving the translational relevance of the procedure. Despite robust pavlovian and instrumental learning, neither male nor female rats expressed outcome-specific PIT when the active baseline was present. The absence of PIT persisted even after instrumental extinction training prior to the test, though cue-driven magazine approaches remained elevated. Data obtained under these conditions may reflect protocol-dependent modulation by the amount of training, or strain-specific differences in motivational influence. Replicated across male and female cohorts, they identify boundary conditions where PIT appears less robust. This methodological adaptation advances the translational alignment between animal and human PIT paradigms and informs future investigations into the mechanisms of cue-motivated behaviour.

animal behavior and cognition↗