A biased activation theory of the cognitive and attentional modulation of emotion

Cognition can influence emotion by biasing neural activity in the first cortical region in which the reward value and subjective pleasantness of stimuli is made explicit in the representation, the orbitofrontal cortex. The same effect occurs in a second cortical tier for emotion, the anterior cingul...

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Main Author: Edmund eRolls
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2013-03-01
Series:Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
Subjects:
Online Access:http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00074/full
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author Edmund eRolls
author_facet Edmund eRolls
author_sort Edmund eRolls
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description Cognition can influence emotion by biasing neural activity in the first cortical region in which the reward value and subjective pleasantness of stimuli is made explicit in the representation, the orbitofrontal cortex. The same effect occurs in a second cortical tier for emotion, the anterior cingulate cortex. Similar effects are found for selective attention, to for example the pleasantness vs the intensity of stimuli, which modulates representations of reward value and affect in the orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortices. The mechanisms for the effects of cognition and attention on emotion are top-down biased competition and top-down biased activation. Affective and mood states can in turn influence memory and perception, by backprojected biasing influences. Emotion-related decision systems operate to choose between gene-specified rewards such as taste, touch, and beauty. Reasoning processes capable of planning ahead with multiple steps held in working memory in the explicit system can allow the gene-specified rewards not to be selected, or to be deferred. The stochastic, noisy, dynamics of decision-making systems in the brain may influence whether decisions are made by the selfish-gene-specified reward emotion system, or by the cognitive reasoning system that explicitly calculates reward values that are in the interests of the individual, the phenotype.
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spelling doaj.art-5e0b40260a954d419a2ebbdf574248522022-12-22T03:03:24ZengFrontiers Media S.A.Frontiers in Human Neuroscience1662-51612013-03-01710.3389/fnhum.2013.0007444975A biased activation theory of the cognitive and attentional modulation of emotionEdmund eRolls0Oxford Centre for Computational NeuroscienceCognition can influence emotion by biasing neural activity in the first cortical region in which the reward value and subjective pleasantness of stimuli is made explicit in the representation, the orbitofrontal cortex. The same effect occurs in a second cortical tier for emotion, the anterior cingulate cortex. Similar effects are found for selective attention, to for example the pleasantness vs the intensity of stimuli, which modulates representations of reward value and affect in the orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortices. The mechanisms for the effects of cognition and attention on emotion are top-down biased competition and top-down biased activation. Affective and mood states can in turn influence memory and perception, by backprojected biasing influences. Emotion-related decision systems operate to choose between gene-specified rewards such as taste, touch, and beauty. Reasoning processes capable of planning ahead with multiple steps held in working memory in the explicit system can allow the gene-specified rewards not to be selected, or to be deferred. The stochastic, noisy, dynamics of decision-making systems in the brain may influence whether decisions are made by the selfish-gene-specified reward emotion system, or by the cognitive reasoning system that explicitly calculates reward values that are in the interests of the individual, the phenotype.http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00074/fullAttentionCognitionTastedecision-makingemotionOlfaction
spellingShingle Edmund eRolls
A biased activation theory of the cognitive and attentional modulation of emotion
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
Attention
Cognition
Taste
decision-making
emotion
Olfaction
title A biased activation theory of the cognitive and attentional modulation of emotion
title_full A biased activation theory of the cognitive and attentional modulation of emotion
title_fullStr A biased activation theory of the cognitive and attentional modulation of emotion
title_full_unstemmed A biased activation theory of the cognitive and attentional modulation of emotion
title_short A biased activation theory of the cognitive and attentional modulation of emotion
title_sort biased activation theory of the cognitive and attentional modulation of emotion
topic Attention
Cognition
Taste
decision-making
emotion
Olfaction
url http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00074/full
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