Yale! and more neuroscience stuff

So I got my J-1 visa in the post and the plane tickets are booked, so I guess it's official - I'm off to Yale! (Only for a practicum, don't get too excited). I'll be leaving January 18 and returning to Guelph June 23. I have a six-month visa but they wanted me to arrive slightly later in the term so they would have time available for me, and I wanted to get out of there a week or so before my visa's up so there is no question of being put on any horrible US blacklists :)

It will be a very interesting project. We don't know exactly how the effect I am looking at works, but we suspect it relies heavily on a brain area called the anterior cingulate cortex, which detects conflicts between your expected or prepotent response and a cue that you see that tells you to do the opposite (e.g. you would normally press a button, but you see a stop signal telling you not to press it). EEG studies have found that when you use scalp electrodes to record brain waves during this sort of task, you see a particular waveform that is thought to be coming from the anterior cingulate.

But down at Yale, they have been doing a longitudinal study for 13 years on a group of people who were exposed to cocaine in utero (their mothers did cocaine while pregnant). One thing they have found is that this exposure likely caused developmental anterior cingulate damage. These adolescents have trouble with response inhibition in the first place, and EEG studies show that they seem to be recruiting extra brain areas to help out with this sort of thing instead of just relying on the anterior cingulate as in non-cocaine-exposed people. It will be very interesting to see whether they show the effect at all, since the main brain area for it may be damaged. Also it will be interesting to compare their results to my adult drug user population.

Anyway, sorry for all the neuroscience detail, but I know at least one or two readers might have an interest in this sort of thing!

So basically this is all very exciting, if not a little terrifying. It will be a lot to learn in a short period of time, plus I have lots and lots of extra work to do this semester to make sure things on the home front will be caught up. But I guess if life wasn't crazy it would be boring...

What I Do

Okay, Lisa asked for a thesis synopsis but it was getting way too long for a comment, so I'm posting it here. I hope this makes sense - it's hard to explain to people.

It is pretty obvious that emotional things attract attention - if you see someone suddenly look terrified, you will pay attention to them. However, it turns out that the opposite is also true - ignoring something (taking away attention) can lead to negative emotional responses as well.

I'm looking at an effect (called inhibitory devaluation) where it turns out that ignoring something makes you later dislike it. So if you're looking for a red target and ignoring yellow distractors, when you're later asked you will rate the red target as high as something you've never seen before (for example, 3.5 on a scale from 1 to 4), but rate the yellow distractors way lower (e.g. 1.5 on the scale). This effect has consistently been found, even using faces - so when you are asked to ignore certain faces, you actually later rate them as less trustworthy even though there was nothing initially different about them!


This picture shows the target (circled) and distractor, as well as the emotional response to each.

Turns out this also works when you have to inhibit a response to something. For example, if your task is to press spacebar when you see Dave and not press when you see Harry, you will like Dave better than Harry because the initial tendency is always to press the spacebar, and you have to work hard to inhibit that response when you see Harry.

We think this is because when you ignore or inhibit something, a part of your brain called the anterior cingulate (ACC) detects a conflict. Its job is to monitor incoming info (eg. from the visual system) and detect when something doesn't seem right or there is a conflict between two responses. So it detects that you are trying to ignore or inhibit something even though your NORMAL response would be to pay attention/not inhibit the thing.



This shows the visual input coming in to the anterior cingulate, which detects a conflict and influences the parts of your brain that deal with attention.

The anterior cingulate is hooked up to the emotional parts of your brain (amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex), and it seems like this "conflict" between your normal response and what you know you should do according to the instructions you've been given is interpreted by these areas as a "bad thing" - so you get a negative emotional response. This is then stored with the representation of the image you just saw, so next time you see it, you still dislike it (but you don't know why).


This shows the above conflict detected by the anterior cingulate being translated into an emotional response

This is all totally unconscious. We think it is a side effect of how the brain organizes information. It's important to be able to code things as important (e.g. attach positive emotions) or troublesome (e.g. attach negative emotions), and the emotion system is what helps to code things and people in our environment. So if you're searching for something and ignoring everything else, attaching a negative emotional response to it helps you avoid it next time you see it.

So basically - when mom told me to "just ignore" my brothers, she was setting me up for a life of research! Attention is way more powerful than we ever knew.

ANYWAY... I am going to try using this effect with people who are addicted to drugs. They have a very, very strong emotional response to drug cues (e.g. seeing a needle or whatever). When they see drug cues, they tend to start getting cravings, which makes it hard to stay off drugs. We are wondering if we can harness this inhibitory devaluation effect to cut right through that positive response to drug cues, instead getting people to associate drug cues with disliking/negative emotions in the same way as above. If we can cut down on positive emotions to these cues, we might be able to cut down on cravings and therefore on relapse (craving is associated with increased relapse in the literature).

Sorry that was so long. I don't know if you would ever want to tell anyone about all that, but I guess you could always just say I study attention-emotion interactions and leave it at that!

Just to be complete - here are some references in case you're interested/very, very bored.
Devaluation papers:
Raymond, J. E., Fenske, M. J, & Tavassoli, N. T. (2003). Selective attention determines emotional responses to novel visual stimuli. Psychological Science, 14, 537-542.

Fenske, M. J., & Raymond, J. E. (2006). Affective influences of selective attention. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15,(6), 312- 316.

Why cravings = emotional response in drug users:

Franken, I. H. A. (2003).Drug craving and addiction: integrating psychological and neuropsychopharmacological approaches. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, 27(4), 563-579.