Research
Life is filled with moments that evoke affective responses – we attend weddings and funerals, witness violence and affection, experience wins and losses. Our memories of these affective events impact a range of behaviors, including our decision making and our subjective well-being. In the MAPL Lab we examine how affective states, specifically emotion and motivation, influence the encoding and retrieval of memories and how the links between cognitive and affective processing change across the lifespan. To study the cognitive and neural mechanisms of affect-cognition interactions, we use multiple methods including behavioral tasks, functional neuroimaging, physiological measures, eye-tracking, and computational and mathematical modeling.
How does emotional valence influence memory?
Emotion can influence cognition. For example, emotion affects all stages of memory including encoding, consolidation, and retrieval processes, but the memorial outcome may differ depending on whether the emotion is of positive or negative valence. Further, younger adults tend to remember negative information, and older adults remember positive information better than neutral. We are interested in studying valence differences in affect-modulated cognition, the neural mechanisms that underlie these valence differences, and how this may change across the lifespan.
Can affective states improve cognition in older adults?
As the US population continues to age, the need for cognitive interventions for older adults is increasing and necessary for older adults to maintain independence. Prior work has provided evidence that older adults still exhibit sensitivity to rewards, can cognitively control their behavior when motivated to the same extent as younger adults, and that engagement of the reward network in the brain is still intact. We are interested in testing whether we can tap into preserved affective abilities to improve cognitive performance (e.g., memory) in healthy older adults. This basic research may stimulate the development of affective memory interventions, as well as research into pharmacological (e.g., dopamine based) treatment of age related memory decline.
Do emotion and motivation influence cognition in the same way?
Despite the close link between emotion and motivation, neuroimaging and behavioral research suggests that they are not the same construct. We are continuing to investigate whether motivation and emotion compete for attentional and cognitive resources, or whether they can interact, to delineate under what experimental circumstances emotion and motivation. We believe this line of work has broad implications ranging from education to clinical importance.