Catherine Hartley

Last updated
Catherine Hartley
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Stanford University
New York University
Weill Cornell Medical College
Known forDevelopmental changes in decision-making and motivated behavior in humans
Awards2020 Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award, 2019 Early Career Award Society for Neuroeconomics, 2018 Association for Psychological Science Janet Taylor Spence Award
Scientific career
FieldsPsychology, neuroscience
Institutions New York University

Catherine Hartley is an American psychologist and an Associate Professor of Psychology within the Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science at New York University in New York City. Hartley's research explores how brain development impacts the evaluation of negative experiences, decision-making, and motivated behavior. Her work has helped to elucidate how uncontrollable aversive events affect fear learning and how learning to control aversive stimuli can improve emotional resilience.

Contents

Early life and education

Hartley has been interested in how experiences guide decision making and behaviors for as long as she can remember. [1] In her high school AP Psychology class, she read a book by Oliver Sacks and this was one pivotal moment in her decision to pursue a career in academic psychology. [1] She pursued her undergraduate degree at Stanford University, majoring in Symbolic Systems. [2] During her undergrad, she joined the lab of John Gabrieli and worked under the mentorship of a graduate student in the lab, Noam Sobel. [3] She conducted her undergraduate research in Cognitive Neuroscience and became a co-author on three publications exploring human olfaction. [4]  Her work helped elucidate that the anterior cerebellum plays a role in regulating sniff volume in relation to odour concentration and that the human brain is activated by odourants at undetectably low concentrations. [5]

After graduating from Stanford in 1999 with a Bachelors of Science, Hartley decided to pursue work in industry as a software engineer at a small artificial intelligence startup in New York City. [3] She worked with the startup for two years, building intelligent machines into software systems. [6] Hartley later used this training in AI where she learned to think about the basic ingredients of intelligence, in her own independent research program. [6] She then joined her former colleagues to work on algorithmic financial market predictions. [3]

By 2006, Hartley was ready to return to academia, and pursued her graduate work at the New York University in the Department of Psychology. [7] She worked under the mentorship of Elizabeth A. Phelps studying Individual differences in the expression and control of conditioned fear. [7] Hartley had her first child during her PhD. [3]

Hartley's PhD work to elucidate the neural circuits underlying emotional regulation and expression of fear began with an exploration of how individual variations in brain structure correlate to fear responses in humans. [8] She found that the thickness of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was correlated with fear-related arousal and that increased thickness of the posterior insula was correlated with larger conditioned responses during fear acquisition. [8] She then explored how serotonin signalling impacts fear memories. [9] Her article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that specific risk alleles in the human serotonin transporter are associated with spontaneous fear recovery after extinction and heightened depression and anxiety. [9] This work highlighted the role that individual differences in serotonin signalling might play in the propensity for depression and anxiety. [9]

Hartley completed her PhD in 2011, and then pursued her postdoctoral work at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell Medical College. [10] She worked under the mentorship of B.J. Casey. [7]  During this time, she continued to publish many papers from her graduate work and also had her second child. [3] The work she published from her graduate studies explored how control of an aversive experience is related to the behavioral consequences and fear responses. [11] She found that when stressors were controllable, fear extinction was improved and spontaneous recovery of fear associations was limited. [11] Her new postdoctoral further work began to explore the relation of stress to fear learning throughout development. [12] Along with several collaborators, Hartley explored when anxiety-related treatments might be most effective throughout development. [12] They found that lack of synaptic plasticity in the prefrontal cortex in adolescent mice was associated with blunted fear extinction. [12]

Career and research

Hartley was then recruited to join the faculty at Weill Cornell Medical College in 2014. [13] As an assistant professor in the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology and as a principal investigator of the Hartley Lab, she focused on exploring how learning and decision making change throughout development and how adverse experiences and uncontrollable events in adolescence contribute to aberrations in cognitive and emotional processing and how the ability to control stressors might enhance emotional resilience and improve goal-directed cognition. [14]

In 2016, Hartley returned to NYU and became an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Neural Science. [10] She also became an investigator in the Max Planck - NYU Center for Language, Music, and Emotion (CLaME). [15] In 2020, Hartley received tenure at NYU. [16] In 2020, Hartley was also elected to become a Board Member of the Flux Society to advance research in the understanding of human brain development. [17]

Developmental changes in decision making and motivated behavior

Hartley was interested in exploring how decision-making strategies are employed and change throughout development. [18] She found that model-free strategies were employed across all age groups while model-based strategies began to be recruited in adolescents and strengthened in adults suggesting that the development and recruitment of model-based valuation system, and development of goal directed behavior. h [18]

Following this study, Hartley probed the cognitive mechanisms by which the memories of reinforced and unreinforced aversive events are enhanced across adults and adolescents. [19] She found that, in both adults and adolescents, autonomic arousal and reinforced exemplars enhanced recognition. [19] Her work in humans supported the findings from rodents that acquisition of Pavlovian conditioned aversive responses is compared across adolescents and adults. [19]

Behavioral control and threat responses

A large component of Hartley's research pertains to exploring how exerting behavioral control over threatening stimuli changes the response to threats in the environment. [20] It is known in rodents that fear responses diminish when rodents are able to exert control over threatening stimuli, so Heartley and her team sought to determine if this was also true in humans. [20] Using fMRI they found that active avoidance is more important than extinction in leading to long term changes in fear responses in humans. [20]

Awards and honors

Select publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fear</span> Basic emotion induced by a perceived threat

Fear is an intensely unpleasant primal emotion in response to perceiving or recognizing a danger or threat. Fear causes psychological changes that may produce behavioral reactions such as mounting an aggressive response or fleeing the threat. Fear in human beings may occur in response to a certain stimulus occurring in the present, or in anticipation or expectation of a future threat perceived as a risk to oneself. The fear response arises from the perception of danger leading to confrontation with or escape from/avoiding the threat, which in extreme cases of fear can be a freeze response.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neuroscience</span> Scientific study of the nervous system

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system, its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, psychology, physics, computer science, chemistry, medicine, statistics, and mathematical modeling to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons, glia and neural circuits. The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception, and consciousness has been described by Eric Kandel as the "epic challenge" of the biological sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phobia</span> Anxiety disorder classified by a persistent and excessive fear of an object or situation

A phobia is an anxiety disorder, defined by an irrational, unrealistic, persistent and excessive fear of an object or situation. Phobias typically result in a rapid onset of fear and are usually present for more than six months. Those affected go to great lengths to avoid the situation or object, to a degree greater than the actual danger posed. If the object or situation cannot be avoided, they experience significant distress. Other symptoms can include fainting, which may occur in blood or injury phobia, and panic attacks, often found in agoraphobia and emetophobia. Around 75% of those with phobias have multiple phobias.

Operant conditioning, also called instrumental conditioning, is a learning process where voluntary behaviors are modified by association with the addition of reward or aversive stimuli. The frequency or duration of the behavior may increase through reinforcement or decrease through punishment or extinction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amygdala</span> Each of two small structures deep within the temporal lobe of complex vertebrates

The amygdala is a paired nuclear complex present in the cerebral hemispheres of vertebrates. It is considered part of the limbic system. In primates, it is located medially within the temporal lobes. It consists of many nuclei, each made up of further subnuclei. The subdivision most commonly made is into the basolateral, central, cortical, and medial nuclei together with the intercalated cell clusters. The amygdala has a primary role in the processing of memory, decision-making, and emotional responses. The amygdala was first identified and named by Karl Friedrich Burdach in 1822.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fear conditioning</span> Behavioral paradigm in which organisms learn to predict aversive events

Pavlovian fear conditioning is a behavioral paradigm in which organisms learn to predict aversive events. It is a form of learning in which an aversive stimulus is associated with a particular neutral context or neutral stimulus, resulting in the expression of fear responses to the originally neutral stimulus or context. This can be done by pairing the neutral stimulus with an aversive stimulus. Eventually, the neutral stimulus alone can elicit the state of fear. In the vocabulary of classical conditioning, the neutral stimulus or context is the "conditional stimulus" (CS), the aversive stimulus is the "unconditional stimulus" (US), and the fear is the "conditional response" (CR).

Extinction is a behavioral phenomenon observed in both operantly conditioned and classically conditioned behavior, which manifests itself by fading of non-reinforced conditioned response over time. When operant behavior that has been previously reinforced no longer produces reinforcing consequences the behavior gradually stops occurring. In classical conditioning, when a conditioned stimulus is presented alone, so that it no longer predicts the coming of the unconditioned stimulus, conditioned responding gradually stops. For example, after Pavlov's dog was conditioned to salivate at the sound of a metronome, it eventually stopped salivating to the metronome after the metronome had been sounded repeatedly but no food came. Many anxiety disorders such as post traumatic stress disorder are believed to reflect, at least in part, a failure to extinguish conditioned fear.

An avoidance response is a natural adaptive behavior performed in response to danger. Excessive avoidance has been suggested to contribute to anxiety disorders, leading psychologists and neuroscientists to study how avoidance behaviors are learned using rat or mouse models. Avoidance learning is a type of operant conditioning.

Joseph E. LeDoux is an American neuroscientist whose research is primarily focused on survival circuits, including their impacts on emotions such as fear and anxiety. LeDoux is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at New York University, and director of the Emotional Brain Institute, a collaboration between NYU and New York State with research sites at NYU and the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in Orangeburg, New York. He is also the lead singer and songwriter in the band The Amygdaloids.

Daniela Schiller is a neuroscientist who leads the Affective Neuroscience Lab at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She is best known for her work on memory reconsolidation, and on modification of emotional learning and memory.

Elizabeth Anya Phelps is the Pershing Square Professor of Human Neuroscience at Harvard University in the Department of Psychology. She is a cognitive neuroscientist known for her research at the intersection of memory, learning, and emotion. She was the recipient of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society Distinguished Scholar Award and the 21st Century Scientist Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, as well as other honors and awards in her field. Phelps was honored with the 2018 Thomas William Salmon Lecture and Medal in Psychiatry at the New York Academy of Medicine. She received the 2019 William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science (APS) which acknowledged how her "multidisciplinary body of research has probed the influence of emotion across cognitive and behavioral domains using novel imaging techniques and neuropsychological studies grounded in animal models of learning."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wendy Suzuki</span> American neuroscientist

Wendy Suzuki is an American neuroscientist. She is a professor at the New York University Center for Neural Science. She is the author of Healthy Brain, Happy Life: A Personal Program to Activate Your Brain and Do Everything Better. Since September 1, 2022, she has served as Dean of the New York University College of Arts & Science.

Anne M. Andrews is an American academic, the Richard Metzner Endowed Chair in Clinical Neuropharmacology, Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry, and Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. Andrews is known for her work on the study of the serotonin system with a special focus on how the serotonin transporter modulates complex behaviors including anxiety, mood, stress responsiveness, and learning and memory.

Adriana Galván is an American psychologist and expert on adolescent brain development. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she directs the Developmental Neuroscience laboratory. She was appointed the Jeffrey Wenzel Term Chair in Behavioral Neuroscience and the Dean of Undergraduate Education at UCLA.

Nadine Gogolla is a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany as well as an Associate Faculty of the Graduate School for Systemic Neuroscience. Gogolla investigates the neural circuits underlying emotion to understand how the brain integrates external cues, feeling states, and emotions to make calculated behavioral decisions. Gogolla is known for her discovery using machine learning and two-photon microscopy to classify mouse facial expressions into emotion-like categories and correlate these facial expressions with neural activity in the insular cortex.

Moriel Zelikowsky is a neuroscientist at University of Utah School of Medicine. Her laboratory studies the brain circuits and neural mechanisms underlying stress, fear, and social behavior. Her previous work includes fear and the hippocampus, and the role of neuropeptide Tac2 in social isolation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sheena Josselyn</span> Canadian neuroscientist

Sheena Josselyn is a Canadian neuroscientist and a full professor of psychology and physiology at Hospital for Sick Children and The University of Toronto. Josselyn studies the neural basis of memory, specifically how the brain forms and stores memories in rodent models. She has made critical contributions to the field of Neuronal Memory Allocation and the study of engrams.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Meaghan Creed</span> Canadian Neuroscientist

Meaghan Creed is a Canadian neuroscientist and associate professor of anesthesiology at Washington University in St. Louis. Creed has conducted research on understanding and optimizing deep brain stimulation in the basal ganglia for the treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders. Her work has been recognized at the national and international level by Pfizer, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Whitehall Foundation, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation and the Rita Allen Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BJ Casey</span> American psychology professor

BJ Casey is an American cognitive neuroscientist and expert on adolescent brain development and self control. She is the Christina L. Williams Professor of Neuroscience at Barnard College of Columbia University where she directs the Fundamentals of the Adolescent Brain (FAB) Lab and is an Affiliated Professor of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, Yale University.

Leah H. Somerville is an American psychologist who is a professor at Harvard University. She is a member of the Human Connectome Project. Somerville was awarded the 2022 National Academy of Sciences Troland Research Award.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "2018 APS Janet Taylor Spence Awards for Transformative Early Career Contributions". APS Observer. 31 (5). 2018-04-27.
  2. ↑ "Catherine Hartley". World Science Festival. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 "Growing up in science". www.cns.nyu.edu. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  4. ↑ Sobel, N.; Prabhakaran, V.; Hartley, C. A.; Desmond, J. E.; Zhao, Z.; Glover, G. H.; Gabrieli, J. D.; Sullivan, E. V. (1998-11-01). "Odorant-induced and sniff-induced activation in the cerebellum of the human". The Journal of Neuroscience. 18 (21): 8990–9001. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.18-21-08990.1998. ISSN   0270-6474. PMC   6793565 . PMID   9787004.
  5. ↑ Sobel, Noam; Prabhakaran, Vivek; Hartley, Catherine A.; Desmond, John E.; Glover, Gary H.; Sullivan, Edith V.; Gabrieli, John D. E. (1999-02-01). "Blind smell: brain activation induced by an undetected air-borne chemical". Brain. 122 (2): 209–217. doi: 10.1093/brain/122.2.209 . ISSN   0006-8950. PMID   10071050.
  6. 1 2 "Catherine Hartley, PhD | MindCORE". mindcore.sas.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  7. 1 2 3 "Neurotree - Catherine Hartley". neurotree.org. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  8. 1 2 Hartley, Catherine A.; Fischl, Bruce; Phelps, Elizabeth A. (2011-09-01). "Brain Structure Correlates of Individual Differences in the Acquisition and Inhibition of Conditioned Fear". Cerebral Cortex. 21 (9): 1954–1962. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhq253. ISSN   1047-3211. PMC   3155599 . PMID   21263037.
  9. 1 2 3 Hartley, Catherine A.; McKenna, Morgan C.; Salman, Rabia; Holmes, Andrew; Casey, B. J.; Phelps, Elizabeth A.; Glatt, Charles E. (2012-04-03). "Serotonin transporter polyadenylation polymorphism modulates the retention of fear extinction memory". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 109 (14): 5493–5498. Bibcode:2012PNAS..109.5493H. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1202044109 . ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   3325655 . PMID   22431634.
  10. 1 2 "Catherine Alexandra Hartley". as.nyu.edu. Archived from the original on 2019-12-04. Retrieved June 10, 2020.
  11. 1 2 Hartley, Catherine A.; Gorun, Alyson; Reddan, Marianne C.; Ramirez, Franchesca; Phelps, Elizabeth A. (2014-09-01). "Stressor controllability modulates fear extinction in humans". Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. 113: 149–156. doi:10.1016/j.nlm.2013.12.003. ISSN   1074-7427. PMC   4053478 . PMID   24333646. S2CID   207262514.
  12. 1 2 3 Pattwell, Siobhan S.; Duhoux, Stéphanie; Hartley, Catherine A.; Johnson, David C.; Jing, Deqiang; Elliott, Mark D.; Ruberry, Erika J.; Powers, Alisa; Mehta, Natasha; Yang, Rui R.; Soliman, Fatima (2012-10-02). "Altered fear learning across development in both mouse and human". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 109 (40): 16318–16323. Bibcode:2012PNAS..10916318P. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1206834109 . ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   3479553 . PMID   22988092.
  13. ↑ "People". HARTLEY LAB. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  14. 1 2 "Catherine Hartley". Jacobs Foundation. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  15. ↑ "About CLaME, The Max Planck NYU Center for Language, Music and Emotion". clame.nyu.edu. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  16. ↑ "Lab News". HARTLEY LAB. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  17. ↑ "Flux Elections". Flux Society. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  18. 1 2 Decker, Johannes H.; Otto, A. Ross; Daw, Nathaniel D.; Hartley, Catherine A. (2016-04-15). "From Creatures of Habit to Goal-Directed Learners". Psychological Science. 27 (6): 848–858. doi:10.1177/0956797616639301. ISSN   0956-7976. PMC   4899156 . PMID   27084852.
  19. 1 2 3 Cohen, Alexandra O.; Matese, Nicholas G.; Filimontseva, Anastasia; Shen, Xinxu; Shi, Tracey C.; Livne, Ethan; Hartley, Catherine A. (2019-07-01). "Aversive learning strengthens episodic memory in both adolescents and adults". Learning & Memory. 26 (7): 272–279. doi: 10.1101/lm.048413.118 . ISSN   1072-0502. PMC   6581005 . PMID   31209122.
  20. 1 2 3 Boeke, Emily A.; Moscarello, Justin M.; LeDoux, Joseph E.; Phelps, Elizabeth A.; Hartley, Catherine A. (2017-05-03). "Active Avoidance: Neural Mechanisms and Attenuation of Pavlovian Conditioned Responding". Journal of Neuroscience. 37 (18): 4808–4818. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3261-16.2017 . ISSN   0270-6474. PMC   5426570 . PMID   28408411.
  21. ↑ http://www.nasonline.org/programs/awards/troland-research-awards.html
  22. ↑ "Young Investigator Award". Cognitive Neuroscience Society. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  23. ↑ "Hartley & Samanez-Larkin receive Early Career Award from Society for Neuroeconomics". Motivated Cognition & Aging Brain Lab. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  24. ↑ "Dr. Catherine Hartley". WCM Newsroom. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  25. ↑ "The Esther A. & and Joseph Klingenstein Fund, Inc". www.klingfund.org. Archived from the original on 2020-08-07. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  26. ↑ "Rising Stars APS" (PDF). 2016. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-08-14. Retrieved June 10, 2020.
  27. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 "Catherine Hartley - Publications". neurotree.org. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
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