FriSem
Ryan Yan, 2nd-year PhD student with Professor Brian Knutson, Department of Psychology, Stanford University
Title: Inferring affect from neural activity elicited by monetary incentives
Abstract: Monetary incentives and outcomes reliably alter neural activity in circuits associated with incentive processing, which has been linked to retrospective affect reports. Researchers have not yet determined whether, however, neural activity can predict affect ratings at the same timescale, on the order of seconds. Healthy subjects (N = 30) completed a modified Monetary Incentive Delay task (Knutson et al., 2001) while undergoing FMRI scanning and concurrent pupillometry. On each trial, participants rated their feelings either during reward anticipation or outcome in terms of valence and arousal. In the ROI analyses, we tested whether neural activity in the Nucleus Accumbens (NAcc) and the Anterior Insula (AIns) predict affect (Knutson, Katovich, and Suri, 2014). For whole brain analyses, the arousal and valence ratings (or their 45-degree rotation) were used as parametric regressors to model the anticipation, rating and outcome phase. Regions including NAcc, AIns, mPFC and dACC were identified as temporally specific correlates of subjective affect. As with pupillary dilation, neural activity during reward processing, but not during the self-report phase, was correlated with self-reported affect. Together, these findings imply that incentive processing synchronizes neural activity and subsequent self-reported affect, informing the construction of tools for inferring affective responses to more dynamic and naturalistic stimuli from neural activity.