Neurophysiology of Motivated Learning: Adaptive Mechanisms Underlying Cognitive Bias in Depression

Cognitive Behavior Therapy for depression focuses on changing cognitive appraisals of the self and life events. This approach contrasts with behaviorist approaches to clinical disorders, which focused on elementary learning explanations and assumed that cognitive mediation is irrelevant. A better integration of behavioral analysis with cognitive therapy could be facilitated by the theoretical advances in animal learning theory over the last several decades. Animals have been found to respond to events in relation to mental representations of the reward value of those events. The evidence now shows that learning in mammals cannot be explained by passive behaviorist association principles, but requires a theoretical understanding of the animal’s hedonic expectancies and its adaptive response to discrepancies from those expectancies. The mechanisms of cognitive representation and information handling that are implied by modern learning theory have presented clear and specific challenges to neurophysiological theories of motivational control of learning and memory. The mechanisms of human motivational control appear to be similar to those of other mammals, suggesting that progress with understanding neurophysiological mechanisms of hedonic evaluation, frustration, and action regulation will soon provide the opportunity for a comprehensive neuropsychological model to guide diagnosis and treatment of depressive disorders.