MAJOR RESEARCH PROJECTS
Our Ongoing Projects
1. UNDERSTANDING PERCEPTUAL DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES ABOUT EMOTIONAL STIMULI
Our daily life is filled with emotionally charged information (e.g., seeing happy, fearful, and angry faces). Many of these emotional stimuli are easy to recognize, but others can be quite ambiguous to categorize. Most of us identify these visual stimuli easily and have little problem extracting the emotional information from what we see. At least, that is what we believe. An automatic task, such as recognizing a fearful face, involves complex computations carried out by the human brain.
This project aims at elucidating the psychological, computational, and neural processes giving rise to emotion-related visual perceptual decision-making. Furthermore, we investigate how these processes may be related to psychopathology, such as anxiety and depression.
Methodology: questionnaires, computer-based behavioral paradigms, eye-tracking, computational modeling, and neuroimaging (fMRI, EEG and intracranial EEG).
2. COMPUTATIONAL MODELING OF MENTAL DISORDERS
What we can measure behaviorally and through questionnaires are the outputs of hidden mental processes. This project utilizes computer simulation and real human data to gain insights into the hidden computational mechanisms of various mental disorders, in particular anxiety, depression, and psychosis.
Methodology: computer-based behavioral paradigms, questionnaires, computational modeling.
3. IDENTIFY COMPUTATIONAL AND NEURAL CORRELATES AND RISK FACTORS OF DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY.
Collaborating with research teams in the United States, our lab has been involved in investigating cognitive behavioral, and neural risk factors related to adult and pediatric depression and anxiety disorders, mainly using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Methodology: clinical diagnostic interview, questionnaires, and neuroimaging (fMRI, EEG).