20–21 Apr 2026
Goethe University
Europe/Berlin timezone

PSYCH-GPT: Brain–LLM Alignment in Psychiatric Disorders

20 Apr 2026, 14:45
1h 30m
Casino Festsaal (Goethe University)

Casino Festsaal

Goethe University

Campus Westend Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 2 60323 Frankfurt am Main CoBIC Heinrich-Hoffmann-Straße 9 60528 Frankfurt am Main

Speaker

Hendrik Kröger

Description

Psychiatric disorders including ADHD, depression, and schizophrenia are associated with characteristic alterations in semantic language processing. Recent work demonstrates that fMRI activation patterns in healthy individuals during naturalistic language processing share similarity with large language model (LLM) internal representations. Whether this alignment differs in clinical populations remains unexplored.
PSYCH-GPT is a prospective, observational, parallel-group fMRI study (N = 120; n = 30 per group: ADHD, depression, schizophrenia, healthy controls). Participants listen passively to a naturalistic audiobook passage during 3T fMRI acquisition. BOLD signal time series are compared to word-level contextual embeddings from locally hosted LLMs via Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA). Secondary analyses examine correlations with symptom severity and compare LLM architectures.
We hypothesise that brain-LLM alignment is reduced in clinical groups, with disorder-specific divergence patterns reflecting known alterations in semantic coherence.

Author

Co-authors

Kamil Piwowar (Goethe Universität) Oliver Grimm (Goethe-Universität)

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