Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience

Peripersonal space, the representation of the space immediately surrounding the body, will be studied as an underlying factor for threat experience. Early-life stressors and daily-life stressors will be tested as factors influencing PPS processing and associated specific brain activation patterns. Location tracking and geoinformatics mapping, virtual reality (VR) experiments, physiological stress markers, and brain function during the processing of PPS violations in healthy at- risk individuals will be used to identify predictive biomarkers related to psychiatric risk, enhanced neural behavioral sensitivity to PPS interference and reactive aggression in daily life.

Develop virtual scenarios to assess decision strategies in cartoon-like and naturalistic contexts. The core question is how healthy individuals and patients make (mal-)adaptive aggressive decisions in social conflicts given their threat sensitivity, cognitive functions, and learning experience. We plan to present mathematically well-defined aggressive decision scenarios to healthy participants as well as patients across diagnostic categories with high scores of aggressive behavior, threat sensitivity, and inference of hostile intent in others. Computational models that accurately explain behavioral choices and neural responses (tested using fMRI and pupillometry) will be developed to identify the aggressive decision strategies humans employ in approach-avoidance conflicts of increasing complexity and ecological realism. The purpose will be to determine if patients use overly aggressive strategies that are not warranted by the necessary defense of self-threats and underlying neural circuits.