Catherine A. Hartley

Catherine Hartley is an American psychologist and an 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.

Early life and education Hartley has been interested in how experiences guide decision making and behaviors for as long as she can remember. 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. During her undergrad, she joined the lab of John Gabrieli and worked under the mentorship of a graduate student in the lab, Noam Sobel. She conducted her undergraduate research in Cognitive Neuroscience and became a co-author on three publications exploring human olfaction. 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.

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. Hartley later used this training in AI where she learned to think about the basic ingredients of intelligence, in her own independent research program. She worked under the mentorship of Elizabeth A. Phelps studying Individual differences in the expression and control of conditioned fear. 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. 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. She worked under the mentorship of B.J. Casey. She found that when stressors were controllable, fear extinction was improved and spontaneous recovery of fear associations was limited. Along with several collaborators, Hartley explored when anxiety-related treatments might be most effective throughout development. 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.

In 2016, Hartley returned to NYU and became an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Neural Science. In 2020, Hartley received tenure at NYU. 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.

Developmental changes in decision making and motivated behavior Hartley was interested in exploring how decision-making strategies are employed and change throughout development. 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 She found that, in both adults and adolescents, autonomic arousal and reinforced exemplars enhanced recognition. 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. 2020 Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award 2019 Early Career Award Society for Neuroeconomics 2018 Association for Psychological Science Janet Taylor Spence Award 2017 Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship in Neuroscience 2016 Elected one of the Rising Stars by the Association for Psychological Science

Select publications

Heller AS, Shi TC, Ezie CEC, Reneau TR, Baez LM, Gibbons CJ, Hartley CA. 2020. Association between real-world experiential diversity and positive affect relates to hippocampal-striatal functional connectivity. Nature Neuroscience. PMID 32424287 DOI: 10.1038/s41593-020-0636-4 Rosenbaum GM, Hartley CA. 2019. Developmental perspectives on risky and impulsive choice. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences. 374: 20180133. PMID 30966918 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2018.0133 Gee DG, Bath KG, Johnson CM, Meyer HC, Murty VP, van den Bos W, Hartley CA. 2018. Neurocognitive Development of Motivated Behavior: Dynamic Changes across Childhood and Adolescence. The Journal of Neuroscience: the Official Journal of the Society For Neuroscience. 38: 9433–9445. PMID 30381435 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1674-18.2018 Boeke EA, Moscarello J, LeDoux JE, Phelps EA, Hartley CA. 2017. Active avoidance: Neural mechanisms and attenuation of Pavlovian conditioned responding. The Journal of Neuroscience: the Official Journal of the Society For Neuroscience. PMID 28408411 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3261-16.2017 Gershman SJ, Hartley CA. 2015. Individual differences in learning predict the return of fear. Learning & Behavior. 43: 243–50. PMID 26100524 DOI: 10.3758/s13420-015-0176-z Hartley CA, Lee FS. 2015. Sensitive periods in affective development: nonlinear maturation of fear learning. Neuropsychopharmacology : Official Publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. 40: 50–60. PMID 25035083 DOI: 10.1038/npp.2014.179 Hartley CA, Gorun A, Reddan MC, Ramirez F, Phelps EA. 2014. Stressor controllability modulates fear extinction in humans. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. 113: 149–56. PMID 24333646 DOI: 10.1016/j.nlm.2013.12.003 Hartley CA, McKenna MC, Salman R, Holmes A, Casey BJ, Phelps EA, Glatt CE. 2012. Serotonin transporter polyadenylation polymorphism modulates the retention of fear extinction memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 109: 5493–8. PMID 22431634 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1202044109 Hartley CA, Phelps EA. 2012. Anxiety and decision-making. Biological Psychiatry. 72: 113–8. PMID 22325982 DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2011.12.027 Hartley CA, Fischl B, Phelps EA. 2011. Brain structure correlates of individual differences in the acquisition and inhibition of conditioned fear. Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991). 21: 1954–62. PMID 21263037 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhq253 Hartley CA, Phelps EA. 2010. Changing fear: the neurocircuitry of emotion regulation. Neuropsychopharmacology : Official Publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. 35: 136–46. PMID 19710632 DOI: 10.1038/npp.2009.121 Sobel N, Prabhakaran V, Hartley CA, Desmond JE, Zhao Z, Glover GH, Gabrieli JD, Sullivan EV. 1998. Odorant-induced and sniff-induced activation in the cerebellum of the human. The Journal of Neuroscience: the Official Journal of the Society For Neuroscience. 18: 8990–9001. PMID 9787004