May 23d, 2024
Prof. dr. Karin Roelofs – Human defensive reactions and their role in approach-avoidance decision making Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behavior, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Behavioural scientists often assume that automatic defensive threat reactions, while essential in explaining animal behavior, only have limited value when it comes to understanding human behavior. There is, however, increasing evidence that defensive reactions, such as freezing, have an impact on subsequent approach-avoidance decisions under acute threat in humans. Understanding the mechanisms that drive such decisions is particularly relevant for patients with anxiety disorders, whose persistent avoidance is key to the maintenance of their anxiety. In recent years, computational psychiatry has made substantial progress formalizing the mechanisms through which we make (mal)adaptive decisions. However, most current models ignore the transient psychophysiological state of the decision maker. Here, I argue that the balance between para-sympathetic and sympathetic activity is instrumental in driving the psychophysiological state of freezing, and that it influences approach-avoidance decisions under acute threat in different ways. To illustrate, I first explore the effects of freezing on different kinds of human action decisions under threat. Next, I discuss recent translational (rodent-human) work that has helped to characterize the neural mechanisms implicated in animal and human defensive freezing. Finally, through two prospective longitudinal studies, I show that individual differences in susceptibility to freezing are predictive of the development of anxiety symptoms. Overall, this work suggests that defensive threat reactions and associated psychophysiological states not only affect acute decision making, but also predict long-term symptom development. As such, these factors have great importance for resilience research, and should constitute an integral part of any theory of human decision making.
May 24th, 2024
Prof. dr. Soyoung Park – Towards a holistic approach to human decision making Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (Neuroscience Research Center) and German Institute for Human Nutrition (DIfE – Leibniz Alliances)
What drives us to trust someone we just met? Did we eat spaghetti for lunch because we saw our colleague eat spaghetti? Can our breakfast impact our decisions throughout the day? I propose to view decision neuroscience as a highly interactive interdisciplinary research field, since we need to continuously integrate internal and external information to make and modulate decisions. On the one hand, I will present how decisions emerge as a result of intense body-brain interactions, exemplified by how the food we have eaten can change our decisions via metabolic pathways. On the other hand, our decisions are shaped by the constant integration of social information around us. In this talk, I will present a series of recent studies from my lab in which we shed light on the importance of the holistic nature of decision neuroscience, including metabolic and social aspects.
May 25th, 2024
Prof. dr. Salvatore Aglioti – Embodied morality: influence of exteroceptive and interoceptive bodily cues on moral decisions in real and virtual interactions. Sapienza University of Rome and cln2s@sapienza, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy & Fondazione Santa Lucia, IRCCS
Embodied cognition theories posit that even seemingly abstract processes such as language syntax may be biased by the sensorimotor signals through which bodily self-consciousness -our sense of owning a body (ownership) and being the author of actions (agency)- is built and maintained. Adopting an embodied morality framework, I will focus on our recent research based on innovative technologies (e.g., ingestible devices that can transmit guts signals during cognitive and emotional tasks) and established experimental paradigms (e.g., physiological recording of autonomic nervous activity) and aimed at testing whether strengthening or weakening participants’ sense of ownership and agency over artificial agents influence dishonesty in real and virtual interactions. This approach offers insights into how body-related variables influence moral decisions at behavioral, physiological, and neural levels. Specifically, I will discuss the impact of exteroceptive (e.g., the external features of a virtual body such as its physical appearance) and interoceptive cues (e.g., the internal bodily states shaped by cardiac, or thermal signals) on modulating bodily-self consciousness and its relation with (dis)honest decisions. Additionally, I will examine the contribution of less explored, deep body signals (e.g. respiratory and gastro-intestinal) supposedly involved in homeostatic regulation and allostatic brain-body interactions and how these seemingly low-level variables modulate higher-order functions like corporeal awareness, complex emotions and moral decision making.
ESCAN 2024 