Intracranial EEG and Direct Cortical Stimulation Study of Stimulus-Driven and Cognitively-Modulated Emotional Processing in the Human Brain

情绪研究领域已经取得了很大的进展。然而，大多数工作都是通过一些方法来完成的，这些方法还没有使人们能够在单个受试者的水平上解决在毫秒和毫米空间内大脑发生的事情。因此，认知神经科学领域的几个关键问题仍然有待探索。我们在目前的提案中正在解决的这些关键未知因素之一是大脑中专门处理情绪信息的区域如何与我们大脑中负责感知外部世界的区域相互作用的问题。我们的感知是如何被我们的情感所影响的？我们的发现将丰富我们对情绪产生的大脑机制的理解，同时也限制了某些情绪理论的合理性。我们的研究不仅将促进情绪和认知神经科学的进步，而且将促进我们对神经精神障碍中情绪和知觉系统之间的健康相互作用机制的理解，因此，拟议的研究将对我们的国家健康、繁荣和福祉具有潜在的好处。最后，通过教育外展计划，我们还将支持教育和多样性，以造福我们的社会。这项研究的重点是人脑中情绪和视觉知觉之间的接口。我们提出的研究旨在探索刺激驱动和认知调节的情绪过程如何影响我们对面孔的视觉感知。为了达到拟议计划的总体目标，我们将采用多模式方法来测量具有颅内电极的神经元群体活动，并通过使用直接皮质刺激来干扰它们的活动来探索它们的因果重要性。除了颅内电生理(IEEG)和直接皮质刺激(DC)外，我们还将测量主观报告、行为和瞳孔活动。作为难治性局灶性癫痫临床评估的一部分，我们的研究涉及接受数天侵入性监测的人类受试者。刺激驱动的情绪是由生物上根深蒂固的知觉产生的，意识意识不一定能接触到这些感知；因此，刺激驱动的情绪与快速准备行动的原型反应有关。情绪面孔，如那些表达愤怒和喜悦/幸福的面孔，被用来引发刺激驱动的情绪。相比之下，认知调节的情绪是通过认知过程产生的，例如语境信息，这些信息导致对刺激如何与一个人的动机相关的认知评估，而不是本身的具体感知刺激。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

There has been a great deal of progress in the field of emotion research. However, most of the work has been performed with methods that have not enabled one to address what happens in the brain in the millisecond and millimeter space at the single-subject individual level. As a result, several key questions in the field of cognitive neuroscience have remained open for exploration. One of these key unknowns that we are addressing in our current proposal is the question of how brain regions specialized in processing emotional information interact with those areas of our brain that are engaged in perceiving the outer world. How does our perception get colored by our emotion? Our findings will enrich our understanding of the brain mechanisms of emotion generation while also constraining the plausibility of certain emotion theories. Our research will not only promote the progress of emotion and cognitive neuroscience, but also it will advance our understanding of how the mechanisms of healthy interaction between emotional and perceptual system might be affected in neuropsychiatric disorders and as such the proposed research will have potential benefits to our national health, prosperity and welfare. Lastly, through educational outreach programs, we will also support education and diversity to benefit our society. This research is focused on the interface between emotion and visual perception in the human brain. Our proposed research aims to explore how stimulus-driven and cognitively-modulated emotional processes affect our visual perception of faces. To reach the overarching goal of the proposed plan, we will adopt a multimodal approach to measure neuronal population activity with intracranial electrodes and probe their causal importance by perturbing their activity using direct cortical stimulation. In addition to intracranial electrophysiology (iEEG) and direct cortical stimulation (DCS), we will measure subjective report, behavior, and pupillary activity. Our research involves human subjects undergoing invasive monitoring for several days as part of clinical evaluation for refractory focal epilepsy. Stimulus-driven emotions are generated by biologically entrenched perceptions that may not be necessarily accessible to conscious awareness; as such, stimulus-driven emotions are associated with prototypical responses that quickly prepare for action. Emotional faces, such as those expressing anger and joy/happiness, are used to elicit stimulus-driven emotions. In contrast, cognitively-modulated emotions are generated through cognitive processes such as contextual information that lead to cognitive appraisal of how a stimulus relates to one's motivations, rather than a specific perceptual stimulus per se.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.