The Motivated Cognition Lab is directed by Dr. Rebecca Todd. Our research interests lie at the interface between emotion and cognition. Specifically, we investigate neurocognitive processes that underlie the influence of emotion on what we attend to, learn, and later remember.

Our questions focus on how people perceive some aspects of the world as more emotionally important, or salient, than others, and how these differences are linked to patterns of learning, memory, and action. We are interested in how the emotional meaning of each individual’s world arises out of shared and lived experience, and in how neurocognitive processes underlying affective biases contribute to how we respond to stress and in mood disorders. In order to probe our questions from multiple angles we use convergent methods of measuring brain and behaviour, including EEG (brain electrical activity measured at the scalp), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), measures of physiology (heartrate, electrodermal activity), and measurement of behaviour using techniques from psychophysics as well as videos and interviews. Our foundational methods are quantitative but we increasingly aim to integrate qualitive research into our research program. In our cognitive neuroscience research we are committed to a collaborative, translational approach linking our research on brain and behaviour patterns in nonclinical populations to rodent research examining related neurocircuitry and pharmacology and to clinical research on patient populations with mood disorders. We currently collaborate with researchers in Behavioural Neuroscience, Psychiatry, Computer Science, Philosophy, Dance, and Land and Food Systems.

Funders