死亡认知神经机理的多模态脑功能成像研究

死亡意识是人类独特的心理活动之一，它一方面引起存在焦虑，另一方面激励人类创造多种文化价值观来缓解存在焦虑，并对人类的认知、情绪及行为决策产生广泛的影响。然而，我们对人类大脑如何认知死亡却知之甚少。基于我们先前的脑功能成像研究结果，本项目拟结合多种脑功能成像技术（包括脑电、功能磁共振和脑磁图等），开展系列实验，检验以下科学假设：（1）突显神经网络（包括扣带回和脑岛）在死亡认知中起关键作用；（2）死亡关联的瞬态和稳态表征双向调控突显神经网络活动。本项目将通过分析多模态脑功能成像实验结果，特别是凸显网络不同阶段活动的关系，建立与死亡认知相关的动态神经活动模型，提出新的关于死亡认知的心理学理论，增进对死亡认知的心理和神经基础的理解。本项目的研究成果对理解人类在死亡威胁情景下的行为决策具有重要意义。

Death awareness is a unique human mental process that produces existential anxiety but inspires creation of cultural worldviews to buffer death anxiety and extensively influences our cognition, emotion and decision making. However, we have known little about how death cognition is mediated by the brain. Based the neuroimaging findings of our previous studies, this project aims to integrate multimodal brain imaging techniques (including EEG/ERP, fMRI, and MEG) to test the following hypotheses: (1) the salience network that consists of the cingulate and insular cortex plays a key role in death cognition; (2) transient and sustained representations of death-association modulate the salience network activity in opposite directions. By analyzing multimodal brain imaging results and the salience network activities in different stages, we aim to identify a dynamic neural model of death cognition, put forward new psychological accounts of death cognition. The findings of this project would improve our understanding of psychological and neural substrates of death cognition and would be important for understanding human decision making under mortality threat.