Symposium

Dissociating Mechanisms of Awareness in Emotion-Induced Blindness
Steven B. Most
University of Delaware
Steve Most will present research on mechanisms through which emotion affects conscious perception. Although emotional stimuli have long been known to attract attention, their impact on perception of their surrounding context is less understood. Previous work has shown that emotional distractors impair perception of immediately subsequent information (emotion-induced blindness), but such findings seemingly conflict with studies showing better processing of stimuli that follow emotional stimuli. This presentation helps reconcile such discrepancies by showing that emotional stimuli have a dual impact, drawing spatial attention while triggering the localized suppression of subsequent high-level processes critical for awareness.

The Immutable Nature of Emotional Memories: Emotion-Impaired Memory Updating
Mara Mather
University of Southern California
Mara Mather will present research showing that emotional, relative to neutral, associations interfere with subsequent memory updating. For instance, associating an emotional picture with an object interferes with subsequently learning the emotional picture’s location. fMRI data reveal that orbitofrontal regions a) activate during emotional, relative to neutral, memory updating, and b) negatively correlate with amygdala and hippocampus activity during attempts to update emotional memories. Thus, the amygdala appears to work against memory updating, whereas orbitofrontal cortex helps counter this effect. These findings have applied implications, such as in eyewitness memory, treatment for overly intrusive memories, and educational methods for enhancing learning and retention.

Co-Authors:
Michiko Sakaki, University of Southern California
Kaoru Nashiro, University of Southern California

How Do Emotion and Motivation Determine Information Processing in the Brain?
Luiz Pessoa
Indiana University
Luiz Pessoa will present behavioral and fMRI studies testing whether emotional information processing occurs independently of attention and awareness, arguing that while emotional stimuli may comprise a privileged stimulus category, their processing is dynamic and dependent on the interplay of numerous factors that sculpt associated neural responses. Studies will also be presented that investigate how motivation interacts with executive control functions, leading to the hypothesis that motivation fine tunes executive control in the service of maximizing reward. Taken together, these studies suggest a dual competition framework in which affectively significant information influences the flow of information processing by altering both perceptual and central competition.

The Impact of Social Evaluative Threat on Brain Processes Supporting Working Memory
Tor Wager
Columbia University
Tor Wager will present studies showing that social threat impairs working memory (WM), with fMRI evidence suggesting two potential underlying mechanisms. First, social threat produced tonic activation in a ventromedial prefrontal-brainstem system related to self-focused cognition and mediating autonomic responses to social threat. This system is de-activated by a variety of cognitive tasks, with magnitude of de-activation predicting WM performance. Concurrently, social threat reduced activity in fronto-parietal networks that support WM performance, with reductions in parietal cortex mediating the social-threat-related WM impairment. These studies suggest that social threat induces a shift towards older brain mechanisms for homeostatic regulation and away from neocortical substrates of complex cognition, with deleterious effects on cognitive processes essential for complex cognition.