21-01-2022

Seminario de Investigación: The detailed map of the hippocampal-amygdalar circuitry and its functional implication for temporal context and emotion regulation

Jingy Wang. University of California, Santa Barbara

Resumen: Appropriate expression of emotion should only occur during emotional events when affective stimuli are available - a contextual process characterized as temporal bounded emotion regulation. However, the occurrence of emotionally salient events may distort temporal perception and lead to unwanted prolonged emotional responses. Therefore, time and emotion are reciprocally and constantly interacting with each other. Recent research has started to suggest that the hippocampus is a critical site for temporal coding. Moreover, the hippocampus is known to be robustly and bilaterally connected to the amygdala (“brain-emotion center). In this talk, I will present my recent works related to neural representations of time-emotion interactions. I will first present detailed neuroanatomical findings of hippocampal-amygdalar circuitry from the system to synaptic levels. Then, I will show a recently developed analysis pipeline that aims to investigate the evolvement of functional connectivity patterns across days, which can serve as a code for time. In the third part, I will present functional findings of interactions between temporal memory and emotion processing using a novel human behavioral paradigm. Together, these findings demonstrate the centrality of hippocampal-amygdalar circuitry to the cognitive mechanisms underlying emotion-time interactions.

Bio: Jingyi Wang is a post-doc fellow in the Leap Neuro Lab under the supervise of Prof. Regina Lapate in the department of Psychological & Brain Science at University of California at Santa Barbara. Jingyi is investigating how the frontal pole interacts with cingulate cortex and amygdala during emotion regulation, the impact of amygdalar function on hippocampal and entorhinal temporal coding and whether precise temporal coding in the frontal and temporal regions can facilitate context bounded emotional regulation. Jingyi received her Ph.D. in 2020 under the mentorship of Helen Barbas at Boston University. Her graduate work in neuroanatomy revealed detailed map of pathways connecting the hippocampus, amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex in rhesus monkeys, and delineated the contributions of this network for emotional memory, motivation, and the representation of internal states.

Fecha y Hora: viernes 21 de enero, 12:30 horas.

Lugar: Seminario IV

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