Gilles Pourtois
Interests: Within the PAN lab, I am looking at interaction effects in the human brain between emotion and cognition using specific electrophysiological techniques, including scalp EEG in healthy volunteers (Event-Related brain Potentials – ERPs), as well as intracranial EEG in (epileptic) patients implanted with deep or subdural electrodes. My main research question addresses the links between anxiety and action monitoring. I aim to study how anxiety alters and transforms cognition, here with a focus on action monitoring processes. Action monitoring is a fascinating and complex ability, which involves many different facets, including an early error detection component. Using these electrophysiological techniques, one can track, with a millisecond time-resolution, brain activity reflecting the early detection of errors, as well as the following remedial processes enabling flexible and adaptive behaviors. Quite remarkably, this fundamental cognitive ability (i.e. error detection) is not immune to affective or motivational influences. Errors provide both important learning and motivational/emotional signals. For example, anxiety can reliably boost early error detection brain mechanisms, as if high anxious individuals would react stronger to their own errors. Interestingly, a similar effect is observed in depressed patients. Anxiety and depression (i.e. internalizing dimensions of psychopathology) have thus strong modulatory effects on action monitoring. My goal is to gain insight on modulatory effects of anxiety (and negative affect) on error detection brain mechanisms, in order to better understand how this psychopathological condition eventually shapes human behaviors. This research program is funded by grants from the European Research Council and Ghent University.