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感/动机和认知大脑系统在复杂行为产生中相互作用的基本机制。本申请的目的是理解在招募“自上而下控制”的任务期间这些系统之间的交互机制，包括抑制控制和冲突处理。该项目的中心假设是，情感意义赋予了一个竞争优势，对处理充满情感的信息（相对于中性项目）和情感刺激的情感历史和情感背景的函数优先级。我们将通过三个具体的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）研究的组合：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。情感重要性将以多种方式被操纵，包括厌恶性条件反射和奖励/惩罚（通过金钱激励）。通过这些目标，我们将试图识别情感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将偏向处理有利于情感负载的信息，这种偏见将在行为中以多种方式表现出来，相应地，在大脑的多个层面。重要的是，通过更好地理解正常行为期间的认知-情感互动，我们的研究可以帮助理解许多使人衰弱的精神疾病中可能出错的机制。 公共卫生相关性：该研究将推进关于人类抑制控制和冲突处理领域中认知和情绪/动机如何相互作用的基本机制的知识数据库。这些知识很重要，因为许多神经系统疾病和精神疾病的特征是认知和情感互动方面的严重缺陷，包括癫痫、阿尔茨海默病、自闭症、重度抑郁症、焦虑症和精神分裂症。

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.