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Impulsivity and its role in psychiatric disorders

jnnp · 2025-09-15 · canonical JSON source

13 visible annotations · policy: published · automated confidence ≥ 75.00%

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Dr. Hugh Garavan is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Vermont. He received his PhD in Cognitive Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience from Bowling Green State University in Ohio and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Cornell University and the Medical College of Wisconsin. He was an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin prior to his move to Vermont in 2011. His research uses structural and functional neuroimaging to study cognitive control and reward processes with a particular interest in how functional changes in these systems may contribute to addiction and related mental health issues. In addition to studying current abusers of numerous drugs, he has researched the importance of cognitive control systems for successful drug abstinence. His primary research focus of the last few years has been adolescent neurodevelopment including risk factors for psychopathology and drug use. He is a co-investigator on the IMAGEN project, a longitudinal neuroimaging-genetic study of over 2,000 teens in Europe. He is a site PI and Associate Director of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, a longitudinal neuroimaging- genetic study of over 11,000 children in the USA. He is PI on a T32 that trains pre- and postdoctoral fellows in the application of complex systems methodologies to large neuroimaging datasets and is co-founder of the ENIGMA-Addiction working group which is a data pooling endeavor that combines neuroimaging data from thousands of substance users from around the world. He is also site PI and a member of the coordinating core of the Healthy Brain Child Development study, a longitudinal study of over 7,000 pregnant people and their children from birth to age 10. Dr. Garavan is a member of several professional societies, has served as secretary for the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, was a standing member of the NPAS study section, has been a reviewer for the NSF, several European grant-giving agencies, and over 50 journals. He has published over 400 papers in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and addiction.Impulsivity is implicated in numerous psychiatric conditions such as ADHD and substance dependence. Impulsivity is also the focus of very many neuroimaging studies due, perhaps in part, to the ready availability of cognitive tasks that can elicit impulsive behavior. This presentation will provide a short review on the neurobiological mechanisms thought to underlie impulsivity focusing on the common distinction made between impulsive responding (e.g., inhibiting motor responses on a Go/NoGo task) and impulsive choices (e.g., choosing immediate over delayed rewards). Strategies to identify robust and reliable brain correlates of impulse control will be described (e.g., multivariate neural ‘signatures’) and the predictive value of these brain measures will be assessed. As many neuropsychiatric disorders onset during adolescence, the presentation will also describe developmental trajectories of impulsivity throughout the adolescent years and their relationship to current and future psychopathology. This research will draw on large longitudinal studies including the European IMAGEN project of >2,000 teenagers and the US ABCD study of ~12,000teenagers Finally, we will focus on impulsivity as a target for both treatment and prevention focusing on the efficacy of school-based interventions for improving impulse control.