Luiz Pessoa

Luiz Pessoa
University of Maryland, College Park | UMD, UMCP, University of Maryland College Park · Department of Psychology

About

214
Publications
80,602
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
22,589
Citations

Publications

Publications (214)
Article
Full-text available
In the human brain, aversive and appetitive processing have been studied with controlled stimuli in rather static settings. In addition, the extent to which aversive- and appetitive-related processing engage distinct or overlapping circuits remains poorly understood. Here, we sought to investigate the dynamics of aversive and appetitive processing...
Preprint
In the human brain, aversive and appetitive processing have been studied with controlled stimuli in rather static settings. In addition, the extent to which aversive- and appetitive-related processing engage distinct or overlapping circuits remains poorly understood. Here, we sought to investigate the dynamics of aversive and appetitive processing...
Article
Full-text available
Neuroimaging relies on separate statistical inferences at tens of thousands of spatial locations. Such massively univariate analysis typically requires an adjustment for multiple testing in an attempt to maintain the family-wise error rate at a nominal level of 5%. First, we examine three sources of substantial information loss that are associated...
Article
Full-text available
Mental terms—such as perception, cognition, action, emotion, as well as attention, memory, decision-making—are epistemically sterile. We support our thesis based on extensive comparative neuroanatomy knowledge of the organization of the vertebrate brain. Evolutionary pressures have moulded the central nervous system to promote survival. Careful cha...
Article
Full-text available
In the present fMRI study, we examined how anxious apprehension is processed in the human brain. A central goal of the study was to test the prediction that a subset of brain regions would exhibit sustained response profiles during threat periods, including the anterior insula, a region implicated in anxiety disorders. A second important goal was t...
Article
Full-text available
Insights from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), as well as recordings of large numbers of neurons, reveal that many cognitive, emotional, and motor functions depend on the multivariate interactions of brain signals. To decode brain dynamics, we propose an architecture based on recurrent neural networks to uncover distributed spatiotempo...
Preprint
Full-text available
Sustained anticipation of unpredictable aversive events generates anticipatory processing that is central to anxiety. In the present functional Magnetic Resonance Study (fMRI) study, we examined how sustained threat is processed in the human brain. We used a relatively large sample (N = 109) and employed a Bayesian multilevel analysis approach to c...
Preprint
Neuroimaging relies on separate statistical inferences at tens of thousands of spatial locations. Such massively univariate analysis typically requires adjustment for multiple testing in an attempt to maintain the family-wise error rate at a nominal level of 5%. We discuss how this approach is associated with substantial information loss because of...
Preprint
Full-text available
Insights from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), as well as recordings of large numbers of neurons, reveal that many cognitive, emotional, and motor functions depend on the multivariate interactions of brain signals. To decode brain dynamics, we propose an architecture based on recurrent neural networks to uncover distributed spatiotempo...
Article
Background: Functional connectomes (FCs), have been shown to provide a reproducible individual fingerprint, which has opened the possibility of personalized medicine for neuro/psychiatric disorders. Thus, developing accurate ways to compare FCs is essential to establish associations with behavior and/or cognition at the individual-level. Methods:...
Article
Full-text available
In this work, we investigate the importance of explicitly accounting for cross-trial variability in neuroimaging data analysis. To attempt to obtain reliable estimates in a task-based experiment, each condition is usually repeated across many trials. The investigator may be interested in (a) condition-level effects, (b) trial-level effects, or (c)...
Article
Full-text available
Controllability over stressors has major impacts on brain and behavior. In humans, however, the effect of controllability on responses to stressors is poorly understood. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we investigated how controllability altered responses to a shock-plus-sound stressor with a between-group yoked design, where pa...
Preprint
Full-text available
Controllability over stressors has major impacts on brain and behavior. In humans, however, the effect of controllability on the responses to stressors themselves is poorly understood. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated how controllability altered responses to a shock-plus-sound stressor. Using a between-group yoked design...
Preprint
Full-text available
Insights from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), and more recently from recordings of large numbers of neurons through calcium imaging, reveal that many cognitive, emotional, and motor functions depend on the multivariate interactions of neuronal populations. To capture and characterize spatiotemporal properties of brain events, we propo...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this work, we investigate the importance of explicitly accounting for cross-trial variability in neuroimaging data analysis. To attempt to obtain reliable estimates in a task-based experiment, each condition is usually repeated across many trials. The investigator may be interested in (a) condition-level effects, (b) trial-level effects, or (c)...
Preprint
Full-text available
Functional connectomes, which are symmetric correlation matrices, have been used to study changes in brain organization with aging, cognitive abilities and across a wide range of brain disorders. They have also been shown to provide a reproducible individual fingerprint, which has opened the possibility of personalized medicine for neuro/psychiatri...
Article
Full-text available
A growing literature supports the existence of interactions between emotion and action in the brain, and the central participation of the anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC) in this regard. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we sought to investigate the role of self-relevance during such interactions by varying the context...
Article
Full-text available
Neuroimaging faces the daunting challenge of multiple testing - an instance of multiplicity - that is associated with two other issues to some extent: low inference efficiency and poor reproducibility. Typically, the same statistical model is applied to each spatial unit independently in the approach of massively univariate modeling. In dealing wit...
Article
Understanding the correlation structure associated with multiple brain measurements informs about potential "functional groupings" and network organization. The correlation structure can be conveniently captured in a matrix format that summarizes the relationships among a set of brain measurements involving two regions, for example. Such functional...
Preprint
Full-text available
Neuroimaging faces the daunting challenge of multiple testing - an instance of multiplicity - that is associated with two other issues to some extent: low inference efficiency and poor reproducibility. Typically, the same statistical model is applied to each spatial unit independently in the approach of massively univariate modeling, and correction...
Preprint
Full-text available
Understanding the correlation structure associated with multiple brain measurements informs about potential 'functional groupings' and network organization. The correlation structure can be conveniently captured in a matrix format that summarizes the relationships among a set of brain measurements involving two regions, for example. Such functional...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding the correlation structure associated with brain regions is a central goal in neuroscience, as it informs about interregional relationships and network organization. Correlation structure can be conveniently captured in a matrix that indicates the relationships among brain regions, which could involve electroencephalogram sensors, elec...
Preprint
Full-text available
What is the place of emotion in intelligent robots? In the past two decades, researchers have advocated for the inclusion of some emotion-related components in the general information processing architecture of autonomous agents, say, for better communication with humans, or to instill a sense of urgency to action. The framework advanced here goes...
Preprint
Full-text available
This paper describes the outlines of a research program for understanding the cognitive-emotional brain, with an emphasis on the issue of dynamics: How can we study, characterize, and understand the neural underpinnings of cognitive-emotional behaviors as inherently dynamic processes? The framework embraces many of the central themes developed by S...
Chapter
Much of the past research on how reward motivation and emotional information influence brain and behavior has been conducted separately. Recently, a few behavioral and brain imaging studies have investigated how reward and emotional information co-jointly impact brain and behavior. The present chapter reviews findings from this recent line of work...
Article
During real-life situations, multiple factors interact dynamically to determine threat level. In the current fMRI study involving healthy adult human volunteers, we investigated interactions between proximity, direction (approach vs. retreat), and speed during a dynamic threat-of-shock paradigm. As a measure of threat-evoked physiological arousal,...
Preprint
Full-text available
During real-life situations, multiple factors interact dynamically to determine threat level. In the current functional MRI study involving healthy adult human volunteers, we investigated interactions between proximity, direction (approach vs. retreat), and speed during a dynamic threat-of-shock paradigm. As a measure of threat-evoked physiological...
Preprint
Full-text available
Network modeling in neuroimaging holds promise in probing the interrelationships among brain regions and potential clinical applications. Two types of matrix-based analysis (MBA) are usually seen in neuroimaging connectomics: one is the functional attribute matrix (FAM) of, for example, correlations, that measures the similarity of BOLD response pa...
Article
Human functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data are acquired while participants engage in diverse perceptual, motor, cognitive, and emotional tasks. Although data are acquired temporally, they are most often treated in a quasi-static manner. Yet, a fuller understanding of the mechanisms that support mental functions necessitates the charact...
Article
The present paper addresses conceptual issues that are central to emotion research. What is emotion? What are its defining characteristics? The field struggles with questions like these almost constantly. I argue that definitions, and deciding what is the proper status of emotion, are not a requirement for scientific progress – in fact, they can hi...
Preprint
Full-text available
Human functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data are acquired while participants engage in diverse perceptual, motor, cognitive, and emotional tasks. Although data are acquired temporally, they are most often treated in a quasi-static manner. Yet, a fuller understanding of the mechanisms that support mental functions necessitates the charact...
Article
Although emotion is closely associated with motivation, and interacts with perception, cognition, and action, many conceptualizations still treat emotion as separate from these domains. Here, a comparative/evolutionary anatomy framework is presented to motivate the idea that long-range, distributed circuits involving the midbrain, thalamus, and for...
Article
In this response, I suggest that the focus of “emotion” researchers should be more on striving to develop a science of brain and behavior than on deciding what is the proper status of emotion. Because structure and function are closely intertwined in biological systems, advancing our understanding of complex behaviors will necessitate researching t...
Article
Full-text available
Changes in large-scale brain networks that accompany mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) were investigated using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during the N-back working memory task at two cognitive loads (1-back and 2-back). Thirty mTBI patients were examined during the chronic stage of injury and compared to 28 control participants....
Article
Full-text available
Throughout the last 2500 years, the classification of individual differences in healthy people and their extreme expressions in mental disorders has remained one of the most difficult challenges in science that affects our ability to explore individuals' functioning, underlying psychobiological processes and pathways of development. To facilitate a...
Article
Full-text available
Throughout the last 2500 years, the classification of individual differences in healthy people and their extreme expressions in mental disorders has remained one of the most difficult challenges in science that affects our ability to explore individuals' functioning, underlying psychobiological processes and pathways of development. To facilitate a...
Article
Full-text available
Humans frequently make choices that involve risk for health and well-being. At the same time, information about others' choices is omnipresent due to new forms of social media and information technology. However, while past research has shown that peers can exert a strong influence on such risky choices, understanding how information about risky de...
Article
Full-text available
Both high-arousal pleasant and unpleasant task-irrelevant stimuli capture attention and divert processing away from the main task leading to impaired behavioral performance in concurrent tasks. Most studies have separately investigated interference effects of unpleasant and pleasant stimuli on behavior. Thus, little is known about how pleasant and...
Article
Emotional processing appears to be interlocked with perception, cognition, motivation, and action. These interactions are supported by the brain's large-scale nonmodular anatomical and functional architectures. An important component of this organization involves characterizing the brain in terms of networks. Two aspects of brain networks are discu...
Article
Independent component analysis (ICA) is a data-driven method that has been increasingly used for analyzing functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. However, generalizing ICA to multi-subject studies is non-trivial due to the high-dimensionality of the data, the complexity of the underlying neuronal processes, the presence of various noise...
Article
Full-text available
How do large-scale brain networks reorganize during the waxing and waning of anxious anticipation? Here, threat was dynamically modulated during human functional MRI as two circles slowly meandered on the screen; if they touched, an unpleasant shock was delivered. We employed intersubject correlation analysis, which allowed the investigation of net...
Article
Full-text available
How do motivation and cognitive control interact in brain and behavior? The past decade has witnessed a steady growth in studies investigating both the behavioral and the brain basis of these interactions. In this article, I describe such interactions in the context of the dual completion model, which proposes that motivational significance influen...
Article
What is the place of emotion in intelligent robots? Researchers have advocated the inclusion of some emotion-related components in the information-processing architecture of autonomous agents. It is argued here that emotion needs to be merged with all aspects of the architecture: cognitive-emotional integration should be a key design principle.
Article
Full-text available
Knowledge about interactions between reward and negative processing is rudimentary. Here, we employed functional MRI to probe how potential reward signaled by advance cues alters aversive distractor processing during perception. Behaviorally, the influence of aversive stimuli on task performance was reduced during the reward compared to no-reward c...
Preprint
Full-text available
How do large-scale brain networks reorganize during the waxing and waning of anxious anticipation? Here, threat was dynamically modulated during functional MRI as two circles slowly meandered on the screen; if they touched, an unpleasant shock was delivered. We employed intersubject network analysis, which allows the investigation of network-level...
Article
Emotion is often understood in terms of a circumscribed set of cortical and subcortical brain regions. I propose, instead, that emotion should be understood in terms of large-scale network interactions spanning the entire neuroaxis. I describe multiple anatomical and functional principles of brain organization that lead to the concept of 'functiona...
Chapter
In discussing the relationship between cognitive control and emotional processing, naturally, the central question pertains to the broader relationship between emotion and cognition. Perceptual competition is affected by emotional content. Such influence has been extensively studied by using behavioural and cognitive neuroscience techniques to illu...
Chapter
In this chapter, the brain bases of emotion are discussed. Several brain regions important for emotion are described, including the amygdala, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, hypothalamus, periaqueductal gray, and cortical regions such as the cingulate cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, and anterior insula. Emotional processing is then discussed in...
Article
Research on the emotional brain has often focused on a few structures thought to be central to this type of processing—hypothalamus, amygdala, insula, and so on. Conceptual thinking about emotion has viewed this mental faculty as linked to broader brain circuits, too, including early ideas by Papez and others. In this article, we discuss research t...
Article
Large-scale analysis of functional MRI data has revealed that brain regions can be grouped into stable "networks" or communities. In many instances, the communities are characterized as relatively disjoint. Although recent work indicates that brain regions may participate in multiple communities (for example, hub regions), the extent of community o...
Article
It is taken for granted that the brain is composed of a set of networks. But what is a brain network? How should we characterize them? Adding to Anderson's (2014) persuasive anti-modular framework, I propose that (1) networks do not have a single, unique function; (2) networks are highly overlapping and not disjoint; and (3) tasks reconfigure netwo...
Article
Learned stimulus-reward associations influence how visuospatial attention is allocated, such that stimuli previously paired with reward are favored in situations involving limited resources and competition. At the same time, task-irrelevant emotional stimuli grab attention and divert resources away from tasks resulting in poor behavioral performanc...
Article
Researchers have only recently begun using functional neuroimaging to explore the human response to periods of sustained anxious anticipation, namely potential threat. Here, we investigated brain responses acquired with functional MRI during an instructed threat of shock paradigm used to create sustained periods of aversive anticipation. In this re...
Article
Paul Broca's concept of the "great limbic lobe" has had a huge impact on neuroscience. In this commentary, which accompanies the first English translation of the original paper, we comment on Broca's contribution and its influence on the understanding of the brain bases of emotion.
Article
Although neuroimaging studies in adults demonstrate that cognitive reappraisal effectively down-regulates negative affect and results in increased prefrontal and decreased amygdala activity, very limited empirical data exist on the neural basis of cognitive reappraisal in children. This study aimed to pilot test a developmentally-appropriate guided...
Article
Full-text available
Learned stimulus-reward associations influence how attention is allocated, such that stimuli rewarded in the past are favored in situations involving limited resources and competition. At the same time, task-irrelevant, high-arousal negative stimuli capture attention and divert resources away from tasks resulting in poor behavioral performance. Yet...
Article
Full-text available
Recent years have witnessed the emergence of powerful new tools for assaying the brain and a remarkable acceleration of research focused on the interplay of emotion and cognition. This work has begun to yield new insights into fundamental questions about the nature of the mind and important clues about the origins of mental illness. In particular,...
Article
Cognitive performance has been shown to be enhanced when performance-based rewards are at stake. On the other hand, task-irrelevant threat processing has been shown to have detrimental effects during several cognitive tasks. Crucially, the impact of reward and threat on cognition has been studied largely independently of one another. Hence, our und...
Article
In the précis to The Cognitive-Emotional Brain , I summarize a framework for understanding the organization of cognition and emotion in the brain. Here, I address six major themes that emerged in the commentaries: (1) emotional perception and automaticity; (2) the status of cognition and emotion: together or separate? (3) evolutionary implications...
Article
Full-text available
Entering a state of anxious anticipation triggers widespread changes across large-scale networks in the brain. The temporal aspects of this transition into an anxious state are poorly understood. To address this question, an instructed threat of shock paradigm was used while recording functional MRI in humans to measure how activation and functiona...
Article
Full-text available
Recent years have seen a rejuvenation of interest in studies of motivation-cognition interactions arising from many different areas of psychology and neuroscience. The present issue of Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience provides a sampling of some of the latest research from a number of these different areas. In this introductory artic...
Article
In The Cognitive-Emotional Brain, I describe the many ways that emotion and cognition interact and are integrated in the brain. The book summarizes five areas of research that support this integrative view and makes four arguments to organize each area. (1) Based on rodent and human data, it is proposed that the amygdala's functions go beyond emoti...
Article
Full-text available
Reward facilitates performance and boosts cognitive performance across many tasks. At the same time, negative affective stimuli interfere with performance when they are not relevant to the task at hand. Yet, the investigation of how reward and negative stimuli impact perception and cognition has taken place in a manner that is largely independent o...
Article
Full-text available
What is the relationship between brain and behavior? The answer to this question necessitates characterizing the mapping between structure and function. The aim of this paper is to discuss broad issues surrounding the link between structure and function in the brain that will motivate a network perspective to understanding this question. As others...
Article
Visual processing is influenced by stimulus-driven and goal-driven factors. Recent interest has centred on understanding how reward might provide additional contributions to visual perception and unravelling the underlying neural mechanisms. In this review, I suggest that the impact of reward on vision is not unitary and depends on the type of expe...
Article
Full-text available
Decision-making is motivated by the possibility of obtaining reward and/or avoiding punishment. Though many have investigated behavior associated with appetitive or aversive outcomes, few have examined behaviors that rely on both. Fewer still have addressed questions related to how anticipated appetitive and aversive outcomes interact to alter neur...
Chapter
Accurate perception and recognition of objects is a crucial ability for visually dependent organisms such as humans. The visual system must be able to extract a reasonably constant "representation" for all complex visual stimuli despite changes in size, orientation, and illumination. The neural mechanisms underlying this process form the focus of t...
Chapter
The evidence reviewed in this chapter suggests that the idea of a subcortical pathway specialized for the processing of emotional visual stimuli as maintained by the “standard hypothesis” is much in need of revision. The chapter describes the multiple waves model, which has several implications for the characterization of amygdala function in the p...
Chapter
This chapter discusses interactions of motivation with perception and cognition. Earlier motivation and attention studies focused on investigating changes in response criterion and whether subjects employed an optimal decision criterion. These effects are qualitatively different from those reviewed in this chapter; for example, effects such as incr...
Chapter
The chapter reviews key aspects of the current understanding of the neural substrates for cognitive-emotional interactions in prefrontal cortex based on human functional MRI studies. It is shown that cognitive-emotional interactions assume diverse forms and are not limited to mutual suppression. An emerging theme is that lateral prefrontal cortex i...
Chapter
This chapter refines and extends a framework called the dual competition model in which both emotional and motivational signals are integrated with perception and cognition so as to effectively incorporate value into the unfolding of behavior. The framework describes perception and executive functions as capacity-limited processes engaged in evalua...
Chapter
This chapter summarizes some of the main ideas presented in the book and discusses some implications and extensions of these ideas. Some of the points emphasized are: (1) The amygdala takes part in an impressive array of processes that far exceed some of its proposed functions, such as vigilance, arousal, salience detection, novelty detection, and...
Chapter
This chapter describes a general framework for understanding brain function, one that addresses the relationship between brain and behavior. To do so, it first characterizes the mapping between structure and function. The chapter argues that a network perspective should supplant the common strategy of understanding the brain in terms of individual...
Chapter
This chapter illustrates how the brain’s architecture exhibits extensive avenues for information interaction and integration, and how its underlying structure provides the substrate for the coordinated flow of information that characterizes complex behaviors. It focuses on architectural features of several brain regions that have been linked to emo...
Article
Functional MRI studies report insular activations across a wide range of tasks involving affective, sensory, and motor processing, but also during tasks of high-level perception, attention, and control. Although insular cortical activations are often reported in the literature, the diverse functional roles of this region are still not well understo...
Article
Full-text available
Appetitive stimuli such as monetary incentives often improve performance whereas aversive stimuli such as task-irrelevant negative stimuli frequently impair performance. But our understanding of how appetitive and aversive processes simultaneously contribute to brain and behavior is rudimentary. In the current fMRI study, we investigated interactio...
Article
Full-text available
In the current functional MRI study, we investigated interactions between reward and threat processing. Visual cues at the start of each trial informed participants about the chance of winning monetary reward and/or receiving a mild aversive shock. We tested two competing hypothesis: according to the "salience hypothesis", in the condition involvin...
Article
Despite the general acceptance that functional specialization plays an important role in brain function, there is little consensus about its extent in the brain. We sought to advance the understanding of this question by employing a data-driven approach that capitalizes on the existence of large databases of neuroimaging data. We quantified the div...
Article
Full-text available
In recent years, a large number of human studies have investigated large-scale network properties of the brain, typically during the resting state. A critical gap in the knowledge base concerns the understanding of network properties of a focused set of brain regions during task conditions engaging these regions. Although emotion and motivation rec...
Article
Full-text available
Lindquist et al. provide a convincing case against what they call the locationist account of emotion. Their quantitative approach elegantly illustrates the shortcomings of this still-entrenched viewpoint. Here, I discuss how a network perspective will advance our understanding of structure-function mappings in general, and the relationship between...
Article
Meta-analysis based techniques are emerging as powerful, robust tools for developing models of connectivity in functional neuroimaging. Here, we apply meta-analytic connectivity modeling to the human caudate to 1) develop a model of functional connectivity, 2) determine if meta-analytic methods are sufficiently sensitive to detect behavioral domain...
Article
How does threat processing impact cognitive performance? To investigate this question, in the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, participants performed a response-conflict task (neutral, congruent, and incongruent trials) that followed a variable-length shock anticipation period or a corresponding delay during which they would not...