Computational Psychiatry

Computational psychiatry is a young research fi eld which attempts to bring advances from theoretical and experimental neurosciences to bear on clinical issues in psychiatry. The motivation for the use of computational techniques arises from the complexity of psychiatric phenomena. Computational techniques facilitate the measurement of intrapsychic processes that are not otherwise directly observable (e. g. learning processes) and allow phenomena arising at different levels of description to be related, for instance the impact of ion channel disturbances on short-term memory. Methods from machine learning can be combined with such models and facilitate the analysis of larger, complex datasets. Although there are promising leads, the effort is in its initial stages and it may be appropriate to adopt procedures from the development of pharmaceutical to speed up the validation and translation of computational efforts.