AEI-DFG: The Role Orienting and Defense: Exploring basic Response Strategies in Perception and Behavior

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Florian Bublatzky
• Subject Area: Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience ; General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 566299199

Orienting and defense responses are fundamental strategies that shape human and animal behavior under threat. Which response dominates depends on perceived threat imminence. Research by the Spanish group shows that perceived imminence of the same threat varies across individuals, reflected in heart rate (HR) response modulation —deceleration indicating orienting and acceleration indicating defense. These HR patterns emerge in response to mutilation and attack scenes or fear-conditioned stimuli. Orienting enhances sensory processing and attention (sensory intake), while defense reduces this effect (sensory rejection), promoting quicker avoidance reactions and increased motor cortex activity. However, in daily life, humans mainly encounter social cues of threat (e.g., angry or fearful faces) or learn threat associations through social communication. The German group explores the psycho(patho)logical mechanisms of social threat and safety learning, showing how instructions enhance sensory processing, physiological responses, and behavior toward social threats in both healthy individuals and clinical populations. This project integrates these research lines, applying orienting and defense concepts to a social neuroscience framework and examines the following topics: (1) HR responses to social cues: Investigating whether angry faces evoke HR deceleration (orienting) or acceleration (defense), depending on perceived threat imminence, and linking these to oscillatory brain activity, sensory processing, and motor cortex activation for avoidance responses. (2) Socially communicated threats: Examining whether instructed threat cues (specific faces associated with unpleasant shocks) elicit similar behavioral, autonomic, and oscillatory response patterns. (3) Emotion recognition in threatening contexts: Assessing whether biased recognition of subtle emotions depends on orienting or defense. (4) Reversal learning of threat/safety cues: Testing whether orienting-dominated participants (HR deceleration) outperform defense-dominated ones (HR acceleration) in reversing learned threat and safety cues. (5) Interindividual differences and clinical implications: Merging data across studies and re-analyzing a clinical data set to examine interindividual differences in threat perception and their relevance for clinical populations. Studies will integrate multivariate EEG/MEG, peripheral, and behavioral measures, using machine learning (elastic nets). Taken together, this project explores oscillatory brain activity and autonomic patterns of orienting and defense as functions of threat imminence, social threat/safety learning, and interindividual differences in face and person perception.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Spain
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Stephan Moratti