Neural competition for processing resources in visual cortex with emotional distractors

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Matthias M. Müller
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: from 2012 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 223117258

The overall aim oft the project is to uncover neural dynamics of the competition for processing resources in early visual cortex between a foreground task and emotional competitors. As mentioned in the Einrichtungsantrag it has become increasingly clear that the distinction between cold cognition and hot emotion is no longer sustainable because both processes interact and even influence each other. In the first period of the grant we were mainly focusing on our distraction paradigm to uncover the temporal dynamics. In the follow-up period we plan to focus on newly developed stimulation techniques that will (a) allow us to directly set emotional and neutral complex images into competition by presenting them simultaneously and to manipulate spatial attention, and (b) to investigate the proposed automaticity of attentional resource deployment to emotional stimuli under conditions that observers are unaware of a regularly presented emotional stimulus. Further, we intend to investigate the role of the magnocellular pathway in attention-emotion interactions. At the end of the project we are confident to contribute significant new knowledge for an understanding of the competitive interactions between top-down guided and bottom-up driven attention in human visual cortex. The great interest in our work with our innovative approach is documented by the number of high-impact publications. Further, more and more research groups use our method of simultaneous presentation of neutral an emotional stimuli for their work to uncover basic neural mechanisms under conditions of real competition.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants