Acquisition and extinction of affective bias in perception

描述（由申请人提供）：临床神经科学研究表明，调节情绪的脑回路的功能失调反应性可能是许多精神疾病病因和维持的关键因素。我们也很清楚，感觉皮层对情绪刺激的反应是一系列事件——生理、认知和行为——的重要组成部分，这些事件定义了人类的情绪反应。例如，焦虑患者表现出的视觉反应既偏向于威胁线索，又缺乏辨别的准确性。需要机械知识来解决人类视觉系统中对威胁特征的感知偏差是如何获得（和未学习）的问题。这很困难，因为目前还没有可靠的方法来量化神经活动的单次试验。在这个多学科研究项目中，我们建议使用新颖的计算和实验方法来填补这一空白。我们的目标是客观地描述和量化-在一个又一个试验的基础上-人类视觉系统中伴随条件性恐惧的获得和消失的神经变化的时间进化。对恐惧学习过程中视觉变化的时间过程进行客观可靠的描述，将有助于开发恐惧障碍的客观诊断类别，理解和量化治疗效果，以及开发恐惧和焦虑障碍中注意力/感知训练的新形式。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Clinical neuroscience studies have suggested that dysfunctional reactivity of the brain circuits mediating emotion may be a key factor in the etiology and maintenance of many psychiatric disorders. It is also well established that the sensory cortical response to emotional stimuli is an important part of a cascade of events - physiological, cognitive, and behavioral - that define emotional reactivity in humans. For instance, anxiety patients show visual responses that are both biased towards threat cues and lacking discriminative accuracy. Mechanistic knowledge is needed that addresses the question of how such perceptual biases towards threat features are acquired (and unlearned) in the human visual system. This has been difficult because reliable methods to quantify single trials of neural activity are not available at this time. In this multidisciplinary research project, we propose to use novel computational and experimental approaches to fill this gap. We aim to objectively characterize and quantify - on a trial by trial basis - the temporal evolution of neura changes in the human visual system that accompany the acquisition and extinction of conditioned fear. An objective and reliable description of the time course of visual changes during fear learning will assist in ongoing efforts aiming to develop objective diagnostic categories of fear disorders, to understand and quantify effects of treatment, and to develop new forms of attention/perception trainings in the fear and anxiety disorders.