INTERACTION OF EMOTIONAL PERCEPTION AND VISUAL ATTENTION

描述（由申请人提供）：我们的长期目标是有助于更好地理解情绪/动机和认知大脑系统在复杂行为产生中的相互作用的基本机制。本应用的目的是了解在需要“自上而下控制”的任务中，这些系统之间的相互作用机制，包括抑制控制和冲突处理。该项目的中心假设是，情感重要性赋予了处理充满情感的信息的竞争优势（相对于中性项目），并且情感刺激作为刺激的情感历史和情感背景的功能而被优先考虑。我们将通过三个具体目标来检验我们的假设，这些目标将采用行为和功能磁共振成像（fMRI）研究的结合：目标#1：确定抑制如何与情绪相互作用；目标2：确定冲突处理如何与情绪相互作用；目标3：确定执行功能如何与动机相互作用。情感意义将以多种方式被操纵，包括厌恶条件反射和奖惩（通过金钱激励）。在这些目标中，我们将试图确定情绪和认知之间相互作用的大脑网络。我们预计，一个项目的情感历史和背景会使处理偏向于支持充满情绪的信息，这种偏见将以多种方式表现在行为上，相应地，在大脑的多个层面上。重要的是，通过更好地理解正常行为中的认知-情感相互作用，我们的研究可以帮助理解许多使人衰弱的精神疾病中潜在出错的机制。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Our long-range goal is to contribute to a better understanding of the basic mechanisms by which emotional/motivational and cognitive brain systems interact in the generation of complex behavior. The objective of the present application is to understand the mechanisms of interaction between these systems during tasks that recruit "top-down control", including inhibitory control and conflict processing. The project's central hypothesis is that affective significance confers a competitive advantage toward the processing of emotion-laden information (relative to neutral items) and that emotional stimuli are prioritized as a function of the stimuli's affective history and affective context. We will test our hypotheses by pursuing three specific aims, which will employ a combination of behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies: Aim #1: Determine how inhibition interacts with emotion; Aim #2: Determine how conflict processing interacts with emotion; Aim #3: Determine how executive function interacts with motivation. Affective significance will be manipulated in a number of ways, including aversive conditioning and reward/punishment (via monetary incentives). Throughout these aims, we will attempt to identify the brain networks underlying interactions between emotion and cognition. We anticipate that an item's affective history and context will bias processing in favor of emotion-laden information, and that such bias will be manifested in multiple ways across behavior, and, correspondingly, across multiple levels of the brain. Importantly, by providing a better understanding of cognitive-emotional interactions during normal behavior, our research can help understand the mechanisms that potentially go awry in many debilitating mental illnesses. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The proposed research will advance the knowledge database concerning the basic mechanisms of how cognition and emotion/motivation interact in the domains of inhibitory control and conflict processing in humans. Such knowledge is of importance because many neurological disorders and mental illnesses are characterized by profound deficits in cognitive and emotional interactions, including epilepsy, Alzheimer's disease, autism, major depression, anxiety disorders, and schizophrenia.