The role of emotion and motivation in visual information processing: Neural mechanisms and their change in depressive disorder

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Philipp Sterzer, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Biological Psychiatry
• Term: from 2008 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 61642098

The proposed research program will investigate the role of emotion and motivation on visual information processing in the human brain using behavioural experiments and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The goals of this program are (1) to elucidate the basic neural principles of how emotion and motivation interact with visual perception; and (2) to understand the role of these interactions in depressive perception in order to develop refined pathophysiological models for the symptomatology of mood disorders. Over the past 10 years, numerous neuroimaging studies have contributed to our understanding of emotion processing in the human brain. Despite the importance of our senses in detecting and identifying emotional cues, the role of sensory systems and the interaction with structures involved in emotion processing remains incompletely understood. Similarly, the neural mechanisms of motivation, e.g., by reward, has excited great interest in recent years, but little is known how motivation interacts with sensory processing. The project proposed here will investigate the interactions of emotion and motivation with the visual system and will focus on unconsious processing of emotional stimuli outside awareness, the interaction of attention and emotion in visual processing, and the role of visual cortex in reward processing. In addition, the project will investigate the same processes in patients with major depressive disorder to test whether altered emotion and reward processing are related to depressive perception, in addition to depressive cognition. State-of-the-art methodology for neuroimaging of the visual system such as retinotopic mapping will be used in conjunction with novel and emerging techniques for fMRI data acquisition (high spatial resolution) and analysis (multivariate pattern analysis, effective connectivity).

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups