Bonn and Melbourne Research and Graduate School in Decision Neuroscience

People with depression often experience cognitive-affective impairments, including in their decision-making ability. However, the neural mechanisms underlying these dysfunctional processes and how they may moderate treatment response are not fully understood. This research project investigates task-related brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify the neural mechanisms that underlie impaired cognitive-affective function in depression as well as assess the predictive quality of this activity with regards to treatment response.

Professor Carsten Murawski is the academic lead of the Bonn and Melbourne Research and Graduate School of Decision Neuroscience. He is a professor in the Department of Finance and is the co-head of the Brain, Mind and Markets Laboratory at the University of Melbourne. Professor Murawski uses laboratory experiments in his research to study individual decision-making, in particular its neurobiological basis. The focus of his work is on determining in what ways information processing constraints in the brain affect decision-making, how they lead to phenomena such as cognitive biases, and in what ways decision-making can be improved.