Work in our lab primarily focuses on elucidating the cognitive and neurophysiological bases of (1) attention, (2) emotional processing, and (3) cognitive control. Our position is that it is the interaction of these processes that allows adaptive, flexible behavior and that alterations to components that are unique to any of these individual systems or common to all three, can lead to alterations in subjective experience and psychological function. We have ongoing projects that examine these processes as individually and conjointly.

We consider attention as the activity of a set of brain networks that can influence the priority of the computations of other brain networks for access to consciousness or to cognitive-behavioral output. Typical functions of attention involve obtaining and maintaining a state of vigilance or alertness, selecting sensory information, and monitoring and resolving conflict between possible responses. Attention is involved in nearly all cognitive functions as the basis for the voluntary control of thoughts, feelings, and actions, and is important to the development of higher-level cognitive functions.

Emotion is a dynamic set of nonconscious and conscious neurocognitive, physiological, and behavioral processes and comprises an interaction of generative and regulative processes. It entails changes to the homeostatic condition of the body, behaviors related to these changes and to goal-sets, and in higher order primates, cognitions and control of these processes. Awareness of emotion is, at some level, a key condition to successful processing of and response to emotional stimuli and states. We take the distinction between emotion and cognition to be phenomenological rather than ontological; all experiences have some basic emotional and cognitive components, just to varying extents. Our focus is in how emotion is processed in the body and the brain and how fundamental alterations to emotional processing or to its relationship to attention and cognitive control relate to altered experience and psychological function, in healthy individuals and those with psychiatric disorders.

We define cognitive control as a complex set of operations that exert top-down influence over other cognitive and behavioral ‘networks’ to bias the priority of processing in various brain networks, facilitating goal-directed behavior in the presence of potential distracters and conflicts. Traditional neuroimaging approaches to understanding the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive control tend to focus on the contribution of individual neural structures. However, cognitive control as it is defined and studied is an emergent property of the interactions among structures, and it is therefore crucial to understand the nature of these interactions to fully understand the mechanisms underlying observed behavior. The key nodes of the cognitive control network are in anatomically ideal positions to receive input from and exert influence over diverse cortical and subcortical regions. We focus on cognitive control as a dynamic interaction between neural structures related to bottom-up and top-down inputs, and as a means of implementing adaptive, flexible behavior consistent with an organism’s goals.

All of the above information is based on our evolving understanding of these different concepts and systems. We are excited about the potential contributions that a better understanding of these functions can have for the way that we think about the human condition and hope that you too will find something of value in our work!