Program

It is now well established that sensation and perception are malleable processes, highly affected by biological and behavioral factors. These factors include an observer’s goals, needs, and memories. This presentation gives an overview of research in this field.  First, we present examples of conceptual and computational frameworks that link changes in visual perception to changes in the environment, focusing on contingencies between visual cues and aversive outcomes. We then discuss how human observers learn to prioritize visual cues that predict threat and danger over other competing cues, and how these acquired biases can be un-learned through extinction training. Visual biases to threat, well established in animal and human work, have strong clinical and translational relevance, because excessive attention to threat has been identified as an etiological factor and a potential treatment target in fear, anxiety, depression, as well as in post-traumatic stress. The presentation will conclude by addressing some of these translational issues, discussing inter-individual differences in threat perception in the context of a neurocomputational model of threat bias formation, generalization, and extinction.