This paper describes the outlines of a research program for understanding the cognitive-emotional brain, with an emphasis on the issue of dynamics: How can we study, characterize, and understand the neural underpinnings of cognitive-emotional behaviors as inherently dynamic processes? The framework embraces many of the central themes developed by Steve Grossberg in his extensive body of work in the past 50 years. By embracing head on the leitmotifs of dynamics, decentralized computation, emergence, selection and competition, and autonomy, it is proposed that a science of the mind-brain can be developed that is built upon a solid foundation of understanding behavior while employing computational and mathematical tools in an integral manner. A key implication of the framework is that standard ways of thinking about causation are inadequate when unravelling the workings of a complex system such as the brain. Instead, it is proposed that researchers should focus on determining the dynamic multivariate structure of brain data. Accordingly, central problems become to characterize the dimensionality of neural trajectories, and the geometry of the underlying neural space. At a time when the development of neurotechniques has reached a fever pitch, neuroscience needs to redirect its focus and invest comparable energy in the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of its research endeavor. Otherwise we run the risk of being able to measure 'every atom' in the brain in a theoretical vacuum.
The focus of the efforts for defining and modelling emotion is broadly shifting from classical definite marker theory to statistically context situated conceptual theory. However, the role of context processing and its interaction with the affect is still not comprehensively explored and modelled. With the help of neural decoding of functional networks, we have decoded cognitive functions for 12 different basic and complex emotion conditions. Using transfer learning in deep neural architecture, we arrived at the conclusion that the core affect is unable to provide varieties of emotions unless …
A Proposal for Extending the Common Model of Cognition to Emotion
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；IQMRI（IQMRI（综合认知中心所属机构））；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Dartmouth University（达特茅斯学院）；Middlesex University（密德萨斯大学）
In recent years, emotion recognition based on electroencephalography (EEG) has received growing interests in the brain-computer interaction (BCI) field. The neuroscience researches indicate that the left and right brain hemispheres demonstrate activity differences under different emotional activities, which could be an important principle for designing deep learning (DL) model for emotion recognition. Besides, owing to the nonstationarity of EEG signals, using convolution kernels of a single size may not sufficiently extract the abundant features for EEG classification tasks. Based on these tw…
The perspective-taking in social cognition is an ability that makes third-person judgments about the intentions, beliefs and thoughts of others. We aimed to investigate gender differences in the neural structure differences in (non) emotional perspective-taking ability.Thirty healthy adults (15 females and 15 males) received anodal and sham transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) (2 mA, 15 min) over the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC).Participants underwent a pain visual analog scale, a visuospatial perspective-taking task (VPT) and a sel…
The vulnerable male brain: Men's spatial abilities are condition-dependent, sexually selected traits
University of Missouri（密苏里大学）；University of Genoa（热那亚大学）；Middlebury College（米德尔伯里学院）；California State University, Fullerton（加州州立大学富勒顿分校）；University of Roehampton（罗汉普顿大学）
Emotions are a central key for understanding human beings and of fundamental importance regarding their impact in human and animal behaviors. They have been for a long time a subject of study for various scholars including in particular philosophers and mystics. In modern science, the emotional phenomenon has attracted for a few decades an increasing number of studies, notably in the fields of Psychology, Psychiatry, Neuroscience and Biochemistry. However, since our perception of emotions is not, so far, directly detectable nor recordable by our measure instruments, Physics and Mathematics hav…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Keio University（庆应义塾大学）
An appropriate level of arousal induces positive emotions, and a high arousal potential may provoke negative emotions. To explain the effect of arousal on emotional valence, we propose a novel mathematical framework of arousal potential variations in the dual process of human cognition: automatic and controlled. A suitable mathematical formulation to explain the emotions in the dual process is still absent. Our model associates free energy with arousal potential and its variations to explain emotional valence. Decreasing and increasing free energy consequently induce positive and negative emot…
Subcortical Shape Variations and Their Associations with Cognition Across the 8th Decade of Life. A Study in the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936
Department of Neuroimaging Sciences（神经影像科学系）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Computer Graphics and Visualization Laboratory（计算机图形与可视化实验室）；Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）；Department of Psychology（心理学系）；Edinburgh Futures Institute（爱丁堡未来研究所）
