Speaker:　Dr. Wen Li　
　　　　　 Assistant Professor
　　　　　 Department of Psychology & Waisman Center
　　　　　 University of Wisconsin-Madison
Time:　　  10:00am - 11:30am
Date:　　　Jan 4 (Fri), 2013
Venue:　　Meeting Room, Level 5, South Building

Abstract:

Traditional theories posit that threat perception depends on emotion processing in the amygdala, which informs perceptual representation via its reentrant projections to the sensory cortex. However, accruing new evidence from our laboratory and others argues that biological significance of a stimulus can be stored in the sensory system such that affective value is decoded as the input registers with the sensory brain, mobilizing quick and effective actions. As one of the first operations in the information processing stream, sensory processing of threat then informs and influences downstream processes, directly or indirectly contributing to a variety of emotion-cognition interactions and behavioral biases. Here, I will present studies from my laboratory that combine functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and high-density brain event-related potentials (ERPs) with various behavioral manipulations (e.g., aversive conditioning, affective priming, anxiety induction, etc.) to delineate sensory encoding of threat in visual and olfactory cortices, and to demonstrate visuo-olfactory sensory integration in perceiving subtle (and even subthreshold) threat signals.  It is my hope that this program of research would promote a novel neurosensory mechanism for threat encoding, paralleling or more likely, preceding limbic-based threat evaluation. 


Attachment:

　　Threat Encoding in the Sensory Brain：A Neurosensory Model of Emotion Processing(.doc)