Date: Friday, March 18, 2022
Time: 11:00 a.m.
Speaker: Luiz Pessoa
Speaker’s Title: Professor; Director of the Maryland Neuroimaging Center
Speaker’s Affiliation: University of Maryland, College Park
Seminar Title: Dynamics of threat and reward processing in the human brain
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Host: The Brain Space Initiative, co-sponsored by the Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS) and the Data Science Initiative, IEEE Signal Processing Society
Dynamics of threat and reward processing in the human brain
Research on the emotional and motivational brain often employs relatively static paradigms, such as the presentation of emotion-laden faces. Because natural behaviors evolve temporally, advancing understanding of dynamic processes holds promise in opening new research avenues. In this presentation, I will discuss recent attempts to develop paradigms to study the dynamics of threat- and reward-related processes, as well as their interactions. I will also describe work exploring how recurrent neural networks can be used to characterize spatio-temporal dynamics as measured by functional MRI data, and how recurrent neural networks can be used to study more naturalistic/dynamic paradigms.
Biosketch: Luiz Pessoa obtained a PhD in computational neuroscience at Boston University. After his PhD he returned to his home country, Brazil, and joined the faculty of Computer Systems Engineering at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. After a few years, he returned to the US as a Visiting Fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health. He then joined the Department of Psychology at Brown University as an Assistant Professor, the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington, as an Associate Professor, and since 2011 has been at the Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, where he is full Professor and Director of the Maryland Neuroimaging Center. His research interests center around the interactions between emotion/motivation and perception/cognition. He published in 2013 the book “The cognitive-emotional brain: from interactions to integration” and his book " The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together", also by MIT Press, is scheduled for to be published later this year.
Recommended Article:
- Meyer, Christian, Srikanth Padmala, and Luiz Pessoa. "Dynamic threat processing." Journal of cognitive neuroscience 31.4 (2019): 522-542. Link to Paper
- Limbachia, Chirag, et al. "Controllability over stressor decreases responses in key threat-related brain areas." Communications biology 4.1 (2021): 1-11. Link to Paper
- Misra, Joyneel, et al. "Learning brain dynamics for decoding and predicting individual differences." PLoS Computational Biology 17.9 (2021): e1008943. Link to Paper