This project investigates how oxytocin influences the conscious perception of emotional facial expressions. By combining adaptive psychophysics with intracranial single-neuron recordings, the study examines how neuromodulation affects perceptual awareness and the neuronal representation of emotional stimuli.
This project investigates the neural mechanisms underlying conscious perception of emotional facial expressions and examines whether oxytocin modulates perceptual awareness. Participants perform an emotion recognition task in which the intensity of facial expressions is continuously adjusted using an adaptive psychophysical procedure to estimate each individual's perceptual threshold. This allows emotional expressions to be presented at matched levels of subjective awareness.
To identify the neuronal basis of these perceptual changes, intracranial single-unit recordings are obtained from patients undergoing clinical monitoring. By comparing neuronal responses under oxytocin and placebo, the project examines how neuromodulation influences conscious perception of emotions and how changes in perceptual thresholds are reflected in the activity of individual neurons. The findings aim to improve our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying emotional awareness and the role of oxytocin in human social perception.
