10-Year Anniversary CCNP Seminar – Prof. Angela Radulescu

Dear CCNP community,

Believe it or not, we have been running our seminar series for 10 YEARS next week! Our very first seminar, inaugurating the CCNP, was on Nov 18, 2015 — Prof. Steve Silverstein introduced the CCNP, and Dr. Claire Gillan (then a postdoc with Nathaniel Daw at NYU) gave the inaugural talk on “A Trans-Diagnostic Approach to Understanding Compulsive Behavior.”

We are super excited to celebrate this milestone with a CCNP seminar IN PERSON and on zoom by Prof Angela Radulescu, who also gave the 10th CCNP talk way back in April 2016 when she was a graduate student at Princeton, and who was one the researchers behind the first funded CCNP study (on mood, reward and attention in patients with unipolar and bipolar depression, as well as controls).

Date and Time: Wednesday, Nov 19, 2025, 10-11 am
Location: Staged Research Building Room 127, 661 Hoes Ln W, Piscataway, NJ 08854
Zoom:  https://princeton.zoom.us/j/5821168052

Speaker: Angela Radulescu, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai

Talk Title: “A Reinforcement Learning Perspective on Cognition and Motivation in Bipolar Disorder”
Bipolar disorder (BD) is marked by striking fluctuations in motivation and goal-directed behavior, yet the cognitive mechanisms underlying these changes remain unclear. In this talk, I will present a reinforcement learning (RL) perspective on BD that links learning and motivation within a unified computational framework. This approach aims to identify cognitive markers of BD, highlighting positive overgeneralization — the excessive spread of learned value across contexts — as a potential marker present outside of acute episodes. Modeling results show that heightened sensitivity in self-efficacy belief updating can produce overgeneralized value representations and goal-directed behaviors resembling (hypo)manic symptoms. Finally, this perspective helps reconcile puzzling findings from ongoing work on value-based attention in BD, offering a cohesive account of how learning mechanisms contribute to cognitive vulnerability across the bipolar spectrum.

Please join us! There will be cake! 🎂