Abstract:

Research on the emotional and motivational brain often focuses on a few structures (such as the amygdala and the ventral striatum) thought to be central to this type of processing and separate from those that implement cognition. In this presentation, I will discuss research that embraces a distributed view of emotion/motivation circuits, and efforts to unravel the impact of emotion/motivation on large-scale brain networks that are important for perception, cognition, and action. In the framework presented, networks are viewed as dynamic processes and their organization unfolds temporally. In this dynamic view, emotion/motivation have broad, distributed effects that support complex behaviors.