The role of emotion and motivation in visual information processing: Neural mechanisms and their change in depressive disorder
Final Report Abstract
This research program examined the mechanism by which the emotional and motivational aspects of visual stimuli influence information processing in the visual system in healthy individuals and patients with affective disorders. There were three major topics. The first topic was whether behaviorally relevant information, such as emotional expression of a face, is processed automatically, that is, even in the absence of awareness, and whether this grants emotional information preferential access to awareness. We showed that emotions, but also other types of facial information, e.g., eye gaze and face-like configuration, influence access of visual stimuli to awareness. We were successful in characterizing low-level features of emotional faces that account for differences between emotional expressions in gaining access to awareness, both behaviorally and at the neural level with fMRI. Studying the relationship between affective psychopathology and processing of emotional information, we observed an advantage of mood-congruent stimuli in gaining access to awareness in depressed patients, and of spider stimuli in spider phobics. The second topic of this research program was concerned with the role of attention in the modulation of visual cortex responses to emotional stimuli. Using fMRI, we found that responses to fearful face stimuli in early visual areas (e.g., V1) are enhanced when a stimulus is unattended, but not when it is attended. Interestingly, early visual cortex responses to neutral stimuli are enhanced by the presence of an unattended emotional stimulus elsewhere in the visual field, suggesting a redistribution of processing resources that helps to maintain task-related goals even in the presence of threat signals. The third topic focused on the neural mechanisms of motivational information processing. fMRI revealed that responses to rewardindicating information in visual cortex and subcortical reward circuits are independent of attention, whereas insular cortex is modulated by attention, suggesting a role for the insula in the awareness of motivational information. In a further fMRI study we found that different subregions of orbitofrontal cortex encode the intrinsic motivational value and salience, respectively, of visual stimuli. A separate eyetracking experiment showed that learned motivational value affects the latency of saccades towards visual stimuli. Unmedicated patients with major depression showed altered prediction-error related fMRI responses in medal orbitofrontal cortex during reward learning, but no differential activation in visual cortex. Finally, an additional project investigated the role of beliefs in visual information processing and found that the effect of beliefs on conscious visual perception is reflected by MRI activity patterns in visual cortex. Taken together, this research program has helped to characterize the role of emotion, motivation and beliefs on visual information processing both at the behavioral and at the neural level and helped to understand the role of perceptual factors in depressive psychopathology.
Publications
- (2009) The neural bases of multistable perception. Trends Cogn Sci 13:310-318
Sterzer P, Kleinschmidt A, Rees G
- (2011) Access of emotional information to visual awareness in patients with major depressive disorder. Psychol Med:1-10
Sterzer P, Hilgenfeldt T, Freudenberg P, Bermpohl F, Adli M
- (2011) Breaking Continuous Flash Suppression: A New Measure of Unconscious Processing during Interocular Suppression? Front Hum Neurosci 5:167
Stein T, Hebart MN, Sterzer P
- (2011) Emotion modulates the effects of endogenous attention on retinotopic visual processing. Neuroimage 57:1542-1551
Gomez A, Rothkirch M, Kaul C, Weygandt M, Haynes JD, Rees G, Sterzer P
- (2011) Eye contact facilitates awareness of faces during interocular suppression. Cognition 119:307-311
Stein T, Senju A, Peelen MV, Sterzer P
- (2012) A direct oculomotor correlate of unconscious visual processing. Curr Biol 22:R514-515
Rothkirch M, Stein T, Sekutowicz M, Sterzer P
- (2012) Implicit motivational value and salience are processed in distinct areas of orbitofrontal cortex. Neuroimage 62:1717- 1725
Rothkirch M, Schmack K, Schlagenhauf F, Sterzer P
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.06.016) - (2013) Delusions and the role of beliefs in perceptual inference. J Neurosci 33:13701-13712
Schmack K, Gomez-Carrillo de Castro A, Rothkirch M, Sekutowicz M, Rossler H, Haynes JD, Heinz A, Petrovic P, Sterzer P
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1778-13.2013) - (2014) Attentional modulation of reward processing in the human brain. Hum Brain Mapp 35:3036-3051
Rothkirch M, Schmack K, Deserno L, Darmohray D, Sterzer P
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.22383) - (2014) Neural processing of visual information under interocular suppression: A critical review. Frontiers in psychology 5
Sterzer P, Stein T, Rothkirch M, Ludwig K, Hesselmann G
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00453) - (2014) Rapid fear detection relies on high spatial frequencies. Psychol Sci 25:566-574
Stein T, Seymour K, Hebart MN, Sterzer P
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613512509) - (2015) Making eye contact without awareness. Cognition 143:108-114
Rothkirch M, Madipakkam AR, Rehn E, Sterzer P
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2015.06.012)
