The role of emotion and motivation in visual information processing: Neural mechanisms and their change in depressive disorder

该研究计划将利用行为实验和功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）来研究情绪和动机在人脑视觉信息处理中的作用。该计划的目标是：（1）阐明情绪和动机如何与视觉感知相互作用的基本神经原理;（2）了解这些相互作用在抑郁感知中的作用，以便为情绪障碍的诊断学开发精细的病理生理学模型。在过去的10年里，大量的神经影像学研究有助于我们理解人类大脑中的情绪处理。尽管我们的感官在检测和识别情绪线索方面很重要，但感觉系统的作用以及与情绪处理相关结构的相互作用仍然不完全清楚。同样，动机的神经机制，例如，近年来，人们对动机与奖励之间的关系产生了极大的兴趣，但人们对动机与感觉加工之间的相互作用知之甚少。本研究将探讨情绪和动机与视觉系统的相互作用，重点研究意识外情绪刺激的无意识加工、注意和情绪在视觉加工中的相互作用以及视觉皮层在奖赏加工中的作用。此外，该项目还将调查重度抑郁症患者的相同过程，以测试除了抑郁认知外，情绪和奖励处理的改变是否与抑郁感知有关。国家的最先进的视觉系统的神经成像方法，如视网膜定位映射将结合新的和新兴的技术，用于功能磁共振成像数据采集（高空间分辨率）和分析（多变量模式分析，有效的连接）。

The proposed research program will investigate the role of emotion and motivation on visual information processing in the human brain using behavioural experiments and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The goals of this program are (1) to elucidate the basic neural principles of how emotion and motivation interact with visual perception; and (2) to understand the role of these interactions in depressive perception in order to develop refined pathophysiological models for the symptomatology of mood disorders. Over the past 10 years, numerous neuroimaging studies have contributed to our understanding of emotion processing in the human brain. Despite the importance of our senses in detecting and identifying emotional cues, the role of sensory systems and the interaction with structures involved in emotion processing remains incompletely understood. Similarly, the neural mechanisms of motivation, e.g., by reward, has excited great interest in recent years, but little is known how motivation interacts with sensory processing. The project proposed here will investigate the interactions of emotion and motivation with the visual system and will focus on unconsious processing of emotional stimuli outside awareness, the interaction of attention and emotion in visual processing, and the role of visual cortex in reward processing. In addition, the project will investigate the same processes in patients with major depressive disorder to test whether altered emotion and reward processing are related to depressive perception, in addition to depressive cognition. State-of-the-art methodology for neuroimaging of the visual system such as retinotopic mapping will be used in conjunction with novel and emerging techniques for fMRI data acquisition (high spatial resolution) and analysis (multivariate pattern analysis, effective connectivity).