Friday, October 4th at 3:00pm in the LSSU Library Learning Commons
At a basic level, behavior can be understood in terms of two general classes of motivational processes: appetitive/positive and aversive/negative. Everyone agrees that both positive and negative processes are important, yet scientists still do not know much how these processes affect perception and cognition. In this talk, I will introduce my recent work on the role of affective motivational states in perception and cognition. I leverage recent methodological advances to enhance our understanding of emotion-perception, emotion- cognition integration and interaction. In particular, I will present behavioral, physiological and neuroimaging evidence showing how gain and loss influence earlier perceptual processing, and how simultaneous threat and reward interact in the visual processing. I close by discussing the clinical implications of my work, and how my studies can help understand the mechanisms that potentially go awry in mental illness.