Pessoa's The Cognitive-Emotional Brain (2013) is important because it attempts to clarify in broad detail neuroscience relations among cognition, emotion, and motivation. Pessoa sees these constructs as intertwined in the brain networks but does not make apparent how cognition, emotion, and motivation functionally complement each other as different modes of processing.
A number of important issues remain unanswered. Do Pessoa's multiple waves and dual competition models (pp. 70–72, and Chapter 7 of his book) imply that performance is overdetermined – as Freud would have said – by many actively self-propelling, often connected brain processes? How are external “contexts” and related internal processes expressed in the brain? Are they “passive” representations or coordinated sets of here-and-now-activated multiple circuits (heretofore called schemes)? A better neuropsychology should examine these and other topics, adopting a processing attitude “from within” – a perspective called metasubjective to contrast it to an external observers' perspective (Pascual-Leone Reference Pascual-Leone2013). We illustrate this point by discussing four issues.
The first issue addresses subjective differences between emotion and cognition. Contrary to Pessoa's belief (p. 4 of his book), capturing functional differences between psychology constructs is essential to understand their expression in the brain. Cognition assigns a truth value to experience – that is, asserting whether (present, past, or future) experiences are true or valid vis-à-vis future outcomes. In contrast, emotion processes assign a vital value, evaluating the importance of experience in situations for one's life and living (done by specific, positive or negative, affect systems – love, mastery-seeking, guilt, joy, fear, etc.). These two sorts of value (truth vs. vital) complement one another and are compatible but not interchangeable. Because they are compatible, some circuits or networks carry both sorts of value together: fully and simultaneously cognitive and affective, as Pessoa claims. Some researchers call these sorts of hybrid processes emotions (Damasio Reference Damasio1999; Reference Damasio2010; Greenberg Reference Greenberg2002), restricting the terms feeling, affect, affective (versus cognitive) to processes where vital value predominates. As Panksepp and Biven (Reference Panksepp and Biven2012) have reemphasized, primary “pure” affects have innate-instinctual (evolutionary) roots, each with a distinct sort of affective “flavor” – roots whose number is estimated as high as seven or nine primary affects (positive or negative). The existence of these innate roots is a major argument for differentiating between affects and emotions, because the latter always embody situation-bound cognitions that cannot be innate.
Neural networks differ relatively, not absolutely, on the sort of value they carry (truth/cognitive vs. vital/affective), often modulated by tasks/situations. We talk of cognition when the pragmatically predominant value is concerned with truth (e.g., lateral/dorsal prefrontal areas, lateral parietal). It is similarly useful to talk of affective or emotional when vital value dominates (e.g., periaqueductal gray area, anterior insula, orbitofrontal, medial prefrontal, posterior medial cortex). Affect and cognition, as complementary modes of processing, are in continuous dialectical interrelation (Pascual-Leone Reference Pascual-Leone, Marti and Rodriguez2012; Reference Pascual-Leone and Teo2014; see Pessoa, p. 249) at the service of goal-directed activity: activation of one mode tends to inhibit the other, although they are jointly needed to fully analyze external or mental experience. Indeed, as Pessoa's data show, when affect/emotion and pure cognition modes occur together within the same task, negative-affect activation may increase the use of mental-attentional effort as a result of the implicit executive-processing demand created by need to control the negative affect. Hence, truth value characterizes cognition and vital value affect; emotion involves coexistence of both values.
The second issue concerns organismic functional distinction among affect, emotion, and motivation. Affect and motivation are related, but they differ markedly (Pascual-Leone & Johnson Reference Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Dai and Sternberg2004). Pessoa equates motivation with external reward (p. 135). However, a view “from within” the subject (i.e., metasubjective) shows it differently. Motivation has three conjoint characteristics: (a) Affective motivation is an implicit conative (i.e., purpose-seeking, quasi-volitional) tendency to convert conscious or unconscious affective goals into conscious or unconscious cognitive goals; (b) the strength or energy (magnitude of activation) of this tendency is high; (c) well-learned, purely cognitive schemes tend to apply, because schemes are self-propelling (Piaget's assimilation tendency – with its intrinsic cognitive-motivation strength). Cognitive goals are dispositions to do something that is known, or believed, to be congruent with one's affective goals. Affective goals are dispositions towards the future that seek certain vital outcomes or consequences (escape with fear, approach with love, attack with anger, etc.).
There is reason to believe that anterior and posterior cingulate gyri, albeit different, are interconnected sites where motivation emerges (e.g., Beckman et al. Reference Beckmann, Hohansen-Berg and Rushworth2009; Cromheeke & Mueller Reference Cromheeke and Mueller2014; Pessoa, p. 237; Small et al. Reference Small, Gitelman, Gregory, Nobre, Parrish and Mesulam2003; Torta et al. Reference Torta, Costa, Duca, Fox and Cauda2013). However, the network enabling affective motivation is much more complex. Without attempting a final formulation, our hypothesis is as follows (connections described here are often bidirectional, enabling loops). Once an instinctual-affect reaction in the midbrain occurs (perhaps in hypothalamus and periaqueductal gray area; Panksepp & Biven Reference Panksepp and Biven2012), activation may spread to anterior insula (which may dynamically express organismic, interoceptive needs and costs) and to orbitofrontal cortex (which expresses current vital sensorial values, or external priorities, of the organism), among others. Then amygdala, one of the most connected context-and-situation sensitive sites for affect/emotion, synthesizes an affective criterion of relevance (Sander et al. Reference Sander, Grafman and Zala2003); it provides an implicit, current ranking of affective-organismic priorities for vigilance and attention. Hence, relative to appropriate threshold and in comparison to a baseline/control condition, low or nil activation of amygdala means low or nil affective relevance (although a purely cognitive relevance of goals – Piaget's assimilation tendency – might still exist). Finally, we propose that affective/emotion information is transferred to anterior and posterior cingulate (ACC and PCC), where context-sensitive conversion of (here-and-now dominant) affective goals into cognitive goals takes place, to spread elsewhere (e.g., posterior medial cortex).
ACC can also be activated, expressing schemes' assimilation tendency, in complex cognitive tasks with very low affective relevance and no amygdala participation. Perhaps ACC differs from PCC in that the former is more engaged in high affect or in cognitive conflict/misleading situations; whereas the latter is active in less affective and less complex cognitive (facilitating) situations. We believe that motivational choices can occur in cognitively simple situations with little participation of cingulate gyrus; however, in more complex cognitive situations, cingulate cortex will be needed. Hence, emotions are not pure affects but combine truth values (cognition) with vital values. Motivation may have intervened in the emergence of emotions via (a) and (b) – see the beginning of this issue-section. Once overlearned, emotions are strengthened as a result of (c).
The third issue concerns mental attention as a neutral brain resource, neither cognitive nor affective. Pessoa formulates the concept of a “performance-resource function” in general terms to characterize any kind of task activity (Pessoa Reference Pessoa2013, p. 249). Nonetheless, relations of affect with mental attention (mental effort, working memory), and the relation of each to low (simple) cognition versus complex cognition, are unclear in the book. To effectively employ the construct of a performance-resource function, the “resources” must be properly and explicitly defined, which Pessoa does not do. Like most neuroscientists and experimental psychologists, he speaks of resources in plural, but likely means mental/endogenous attention – usually construed as working memory (Pascual-Leone & Johnson Reference Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Wilhelm and Engle2005). Clear definitions are needed of automatic-perceptual attention versus mental/endogenous attention (Arsalidou et al. Reference Arsalidou, Pascual-Leone and Johnson2010; Reference Arsalidou, Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Morris and Taylor2013) and other brain resources – such as a neoGestaltist internal-field “simplicity” factor (possibly lateral inhibition in the brain) and an overdetermination principle – which together would permit dynamic syntheses in problem-solving acts. Clarity in these organismic constructs makes easier process/task analyses in neuropsychology (Pascual-Leone Reference Pascual-Leone2005; Pascual-Leone et al. Reference Pascual-Leone, Greenberg and Pascual-Leone2009; Pascual-Leone & Johnson Reference Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Wilhelm and Engle2005; Reference Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Barrouillet and Gaillard2011). From this perspective, mental/endogenous attention appears expressed in the brain as a neutral resource (i.e., neither affective nor cognitive, albeit applicable to both).
The fourth issue addresses overdetermination of outcomes of brain processing, as a result of codetermination by many active, often connected, processes (cognitive and affective). Brain's connectivity spreads activation within cofunctional and often coactivated neuronal lines – along circuits/pathways that necessarily express certain semantic-pragmatic probabilistic invariances that give psychological meaning to the circuits. We say necessarily, because (given the anatomy and constraints on processing imposed by experience) pathways are activated and evolve in congruence with organismic and situational constraints. Thus , cofunctional and often coactivated neuronal circuits become unitized (coordinated) under these internal and external constraints, to characterize sorts of action (and change) in new situations. These coordinated functional invariances expressed in circuits are called schemes by Piaget and others (Arbib et al. Reference Arbib, Erdi and Szentagothai1998; Pascual-Leone & Johnson Reference Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Wilhelm and Engle2005; Reference Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Barrouillet and Gaillard2011). Schemes are unitized circuits or networks, embodying probabilistic constraints/resistances of (past, present, future) reality to the subject's actions or representations. They can be seen as self-propelling systems that coordinate three distinct sorts of component, all in dynamic/dialectical interaction: (a) a releasing component that contains conditions predicating features/templates that signal probable applicability of the scheme in question; (b) an effecting component that stipulates or carries cognitive, affective, or emotive effects of this scheme; effects whose application probabilistically brings results, often in a simultaneous or sequentially organized manner; and (c) a functional component that formulates the gist or overall functional description of the scheme: its practical importance and potential contribution to activities. In a very real sense, neural circuits are functional infrastructure of the scheme units formulated by constructivist psychological research.
As an illustration of how to apply the scheme construct to interpret brain circuits or networks, consider the connected (cognitive and affective) circuits that embody face recognition in humans (e.g., Arsalidou et al. Reference Arsalidou, Morris and Taylor2011; Tsao & Livingstone Reference Tsao and Livingstone2008). Face perception and recognition use various brain areas, of which I mention seven of them, from (a) to (f): (a) occipital “face” area in the inferior occipital gyrus (a misnomer, because it analyzes intricate perceptual patterns, not only faces), which extracts figurative constituents (eyes, mouth, nose, etc.); (b) the fusiform “face” area, in the fusiform gyrus, that synthesizes meaningful figurative constituents into organized relational wholes (a face, flower, house, hands, etc.) as distinct perceptual totalities; (c) a site in the superior temporal sulcus (STS); and (d) the posterior middle temporal visual cortex (V5/MT – involved in visual motion awareness) – we note that in the latter two sites, temporally structured patterns of exploration are organized, leading to cognitive appraisal of distal objects such as a face and its meaningful mobile constituents, including gaze direction. (e) A more deeply cognitive interpretation of the complex object (e.g., the dynamic face) may require other areas such as left inferior frontal cortex (BA 47) and the occipito-temporal junction. (f) When emotion-affective relevance such as familiarity is involved, face recognition uses the amygdala. Both right and left hemispheres may participate in this processing, but the right hemisphere may be more involved in ordinary (automatic) face recognition.
When we apply the construct of complex scheme (a coordinated system of multiple subordinate schemes) to processing of meaning in the face, we notice that the occipital areas may provide conditions (releasing component) to the complex face scheme. The fusiform gyri may provide initial perceptual-configural effects (effecting component) to this face scheme. These effects would in turn serve as conditions of a further elaboration: a more complex cognitive face scheme produced by STS and V5/MT, which (these areas can coordinate sequentially occurring changes) would relate face movement-and-perspective sequences to yield cognitive-expressive and emotional, not just perceptual, meanings – with contribution from amygdala and BA 47, 37 etc. The gist (functional component) of the complex face scheme would of course be the context-relevant salient features of this face scheme as a functional totality.
Consider now the schemes' overdetermination of performance (Pascual-Leone Reference Pascual-Leone, Commons, Richards and Armon1984; Reference Pascual-Leone, Marti and Rodriguez2012; Pascual-Leone & Johnson Reference Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Barrouillet and Gaillard2011), a principle that expresses the self-propelling disposition of schemes (brain circuits) with their spreading of activation in “multiple waves.” According to this principle, the full meaning of an object (e.g., face) is attained as multiple schemes with different modes and modalities of processing (located in different sites) become coactivated and rally together to overdetermine total meaning (the cognitive-emotional import) of the complex object in question. From this perspective, automatized and controlled processes – embodied in different cofunctional and coactivated scheme circuits – become combined and work together, as Pessoa points out, because they are part of a more complex (superordinate) scheme they have together constituted with life experience and neuroplasticity.
Pessoa offers new ideas on the neuroscience of cognition and emotion. We have added some new distinctions to neuropsychology relevant for neuroscience, which might help to improve Pessoa's theoretical framework.
Pessoa's The Cognitive-Emotional Brain (2013) is important because it attempts to clarify in broad detail neuroscience relations among cognition, emotion, and motivation. Pessoa sees these constructs as intertwined in the brain networks but does not make apparent how cognition, emotion, and motivation functionally complement each other as different modes of processing.
A number of important issues remain unanswered. Do Pessoa's multiple waves and dual competition models (pp. 70–72, and Chapter 7 of his book) imply that performance is overdetermined – as Freud would have said – by many actively self-propelling, often connected brain processes? How are external “contexts” and related internal processes expressed in the brain? Are they “passive” representations or coordinated sets of here-and-now-activated multiple circuits (heretofore called schemes)? A better neuropsychology should examine these and other topics, adopting a processing attitude “from within” – a perspective called metasubjective to contrast it to an external observers' perspective (Pascual-Leone Reference Pascual-Leone2013). We illustrate this point by discussing four issues.
The first issue addresses subjective differences between emotion and cognition. Contrary to Pessoa's belief (p. 4 of his book), capturing functional differences between psychology constructs is essential to understand their expression in the brain. Cognition assigns a truth value to experience – that is, asserting whether (present, past, or future) experiences are true or valid vis-à-vis future outcomes. In contrast, emotion processes assign a vital value, evaluating the importance of experience in situations for one's life and living (done by specific, positive or negative, affect systems – love, mastery-seeking, guilt, joy, fear, etc.). These two sorts of value (truth vs. vital) complement one another and are compatible but not interchangeable. Because they are compatible, some circuits or networks carry both sorts of value together: fully and simultaneously cognitive and affective, as Pessoa claims. Some researchers call these sorts of hybrid processes emotions (Damasio Reference Damasio1999; Reference Damasio2010; Greenberg Reference Greenberg2002), restricting the terms feeling, affect, affective (versus cognitive) to processes where vital value predominates. As Panksepp and Biven (Reference Panksepp and Biven2012) have reemphasized, primary “pure” affects have innate-instinctual (evolutionary) roots, each with a distinct sort of affective “flavor” – roots whose number is estimated as high as seven or nine primary affects (positive or negative). The existence of these innate roots is a major argument for differentiating between affects and emotions, because the latter always embody situation-bound cognitions that cannot be innate.
Neural networks differ relatively, not absolutely, on the sort of value they carry (truth/cognitive vs. vital/affective), often modulated by tasks/situations. We talk of cognition when the pragmatically predominant value is concerned with truth (e.g., lateral/dorsal prefrontal areas, lateral parietal). It is similarly useful to talk of affective or emotional when vital value dominates (e.g., periaqueductal gray area, anterior insula, orbitofrontal, medial prefrontal, posterior medial cortex). Affect and cognition, as complementary modes of processing, are in continuous dialectical interrelation (Pascual-Leone Reference Pascual-Leone, Marti and Rodriguez2012; Reference Pascual-Leone and Teo2014; see Pessoa, p. 249) at the service of goal-directed activity: activation of one mode tends to inhibit the other, although they are jointly needed to fully analyze external or mental experience. Indeed, as Pessoa's data show, when affect/emotion and pure cognition modes occur together within the same task, negative-affect activation may increase the use of mental-attentional effort as a result of the implicit executive-processing demand created by need to control the negative affect. Hence, truth value characterizes cognition and vital value affect; emotion involves coexistence of both values.
The second issue concerns organismic functional distinction among affect, emotion, and motivation. Affect and motivation are related, but they differ markedly (Pascual-Leone & Johnson Reference Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Dai and Sternberg2004). Pessoa equates motivation with external reward (p. 135). However, a view “from within” the subject (i.e., metasubjective) shows it differently. Motivation has three conjoint characteristics: (a) Affective motivation is an implicit conative (i.e., purpose-seeking, quasi-volitional) tendency to convert conscious or unconscious affective goals into conscious or unconscious cognitive goals; (b) the strength or energy (magnitude of activation) of this tendency is high; (c) well-learned, purely cognitive schemes tend to apply, because schemes are self-propelling (Piaget's assimilation tendency – with its intrinsic cognitive-motivation strength). Cognitive goals are dispositions to do something that is known, or believed, to be congruent with one's affective goals. Affective goals are dispositions towards the future that seek certain vital outcomes or consequences (escape with fear, approach with love, attack with anger, etc.).
There is reason to believe that anterior and posterior cingulate gyri, albeit different, are interconnected sites where motivation emerges (e.g., Beckman et al. Reference Beckmann, Hohansen-Berg and Rushworth2009; Cromheeke & Mueller Reference Cromheeke and Mueller2014; Pessoa, p. 237; Small et al. Reference Small, Gitelman, Gregory, Nobre, Parrish and Mesulam2003; Torta et al. Reference Torta, Costa, Duca, Fox and Cauda2013). However, the network enabling affective motivation is much more complex. Without attempting a final formulation, our hypothesis is as follows (connections described here are often bidirectional, enabling loops). Once an instinctual-affect reaction in the midbrain occurs (perhaps in hypothalamus and periaqueductal gray area; Panksepp & Biven Reference Panksepp and Biven2012), activation may spread to anterior insula (which may dynamically express organismic, interoceptive needs and costs) and to orbitofrontal cortex (which expresses current vital sensorial values, or external priorities, of the organism), among others. Then amygdala, one of the most connected context-and-situation sensitive sites for affect/emotion, synthesizes an affective criterion of relevance (Sander et al. Reference Sander, Grafman and Zala2003); it provides an implicit, current ranking of affective-organismic priorities for vigilance and attention. Hence, relative to appropriate threshold and in comparison to a baseline/control condition, low or nil activation of amygdala means low or nil affective relevance (although a purely cognitive relevance of goals – Piaget's assimilation tendency – might still exist). Finally, we propose that affective/emotion information is transferred to anterior and posterior cingulate (ACC and PCC), where context-sensitive conversion of (here-and-now dominant) affective goals into cognitive goals takes place, to spread elsewhere (e.g., posterior medial cortex).
ACC can also be activated, expressing schemes' assimilation tendency, in complex cognitive tasks with very low affective relevance and no amygdala participation. Perhaps ACC differs from PCC in that the former is more engaged in high affect or in cognitive conflict/misleading situations; whereas the latter is active in less affective and less complex cognitive (facilitating) situations. We believe that motivational choices can occur in cognitively simple situations with little participation of cingulate gyrus; however, in more complex cognitive situations, cingulate cortex will be needed. Hence, emotions are not pure affects but combine truth values (cognition) with vital values. Motivation may have intervened in the emergence of emotions via (a) and (b) – see the beginning of this issue-section. Once overlearned, emotions are strengthened as a result of (c).
The third issue concerns mental attention as a neutral brain resource, neither cognitive nor affective. Pessoa formulates the concept of a “performance-resource function” in general terms to characterize any kind of task activity (Pessoa Reference Pessoa2013, p. 249). Nonetheless, relations of affect with mental attention (mental effort, working memory), and the relation of each to low (simple) cognition versus complex cognition, are unclear in the book. To effectively employ the construct of a performance-resource function, the “resources” must be properly and explicitly defined, which Pessoa does not do. Like most neuroscientists and experimental psychologists, he speaks of resources in plural, but likely means mental/endogenous attention – usually construed as working memory (Pascual-Leone & Johnson Reference Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Wilhelm and Engle2005). Clear definitions are needed of automatic-perceptual attention versus mental/endogenous attention (Arsalidou et al. Reference Arsalidou, Pascual-Leone and Johnson2010; Reference Arsalidou, Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Morris and Taylor2013) and other brain resources – such as a neoGestaltist internal-field “simplicity” factor (possibly lateral inhibition in the brain) and an overdetermination principle – which together would permit dynamic syntheses in problem-solving acts. Clarity in these organismic constructs makes easier process/task analyses in neuropsychology (Pascual-Leone Reference Pascual-Leone2005; Pascual-Leone et al. Reference Pascual-Leone, Greenberg and Pascual-Leone2009; Pascual-Leone & Johnson Reference Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Wilhelm and Engle2005; Reference Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Barrouillet and Gaillard2011). From this perspective, mental/endogenous attention appears expressed in the brain as a neutral resource (i.e., neither affective nor cognitive, albeit applicable to both).
The fourth issue addresses overdetermination of outcomes of brain processing, as a result of codetermination by many active, often connected, processes (cognitive and affective). Brain's connectivity spreads activation within cofunctional and often coactivated neuronal lines – along circuits/pathways that necessarily express certain semantic-pragmatic probabilistic invariances that give psychological meaning to the circuits. We say necessarily, because (given the anatomy and constraints on processing imposed by experience) pathways are activated and evolve in congruence with organismic and situational constraints. Thus , cofunctional and often coactivated neuronal circuits become unitized (coordinated) under these internal and external constraints, to characterize sorts of action (and change) in new situations. These coordinated functional invariances expressed in circuits are called schemes by Piaget and others (Arbib et al. Reference Arbib, Erdi and Szentagothai1998; Pascual-Leone & Johnson Reference Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Wilhelm and Engle2005; Reference Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Barrouillet and Gaillard2011). Schemes are unitized circuits or networks, embodying probabilistic constraints/resistances of (past, present, future) reality to the subject's actions or representations. They can be seen as self-propelling systems that coordinate three distinct sorts of component, all in dynamic/dialectical interaction: (a) a releasing component that contains conditions predicating features/templates that signal probable applicability of the scheme in question; (b) an effecting component that stipulates or carries cognitive, affective, or emotive effects of this scheme; effects whose application probabilistically brings results, often in a simultaneous or sequentially organized manner; and (c) a functional component that formulates the gist or overall functional description of the scheme: its practical importance and potential contribution to activities. In a very real sense, neural circuits are functional infrastructure of the scheme units formulated by constructivist psychological research.
As an illustration of how to apply the scheme construct to interpret brain circuits or networks, consider the connected (cognitive and affective) circuits that embody face recognition in humans (e.g., Arsalidou et al. Reference Arsalidou, Morris and Taylor2011; Tsao & Livingstone Reference Tsao and Livingstone2008). Face perception and recognition use various brain areas, of which I mention seven of them, from (a) to (f): (a) occipital “face” area in the inferior occipital gyrus (a misnomer, because it analyzes intricate perceptual patterns, not only faces), which extracts figurative constituents (eyes, mouth, nose, etc.); (b) the fusiform “face” area, in the fusiform gyrus, that synthesizes meaningful figurative constituents into organized relational wholes (a face, flower, house, hands, etc.) as distinct perceptual totalities; (c) a site in the superior temporal sulcus (STS); and (d) the posterior middle temporal visual cortex (V5/MT – involved in visual motion awareness) – we note that in the latter two sites, temporally structured patterns of exploration are organized, leading to cognitive appraisal of distal objects such as a face and its meaningful mobile constituents, including gaze direction. (e) A more deeply cognitive interpretation of the complex object (e.g., the dynamic face) may require other areas such as left inferior frontal cortex (BA 47) and the occipito-temporal junction. (f) When emotion-affective relevance such as familiarity is involved, face recognition uses the amygdala. Both right and left hemispheres may participate in this processing, but the right hemisphere may be more involved in ordinary (automatic) face recognition.
When we apply the construct of complex scheme (a coordinated system of multiple subordinate schemes) to processing of meaning in the face, we notice that the occipital areas may provide conditions (releasing component) to the complex face scheme. The fusiform gyri may provide initial perceptual-configural effects (effecting component) to this face scheme. These effects would in turn serve as conditions of a further elaboration: a more complex cognitive face scheme produced by STS and V5/MT, which (these areas can coordinate sequentially occurring changes) would relate face movement-and-perspective sequences to yield cognitive-expressive and emotional, not just perceptual, meanings – with contribution from amygdala and BA 47, 37 etc. The gist (functional component) of the complex face scheme would of course be the context-relevant salient features of this face scheme as a functional totality.
Consider now the schemes' overdetermination of performance (Pascual-Leone Reference Pascual-Leone, Commons, Richards and Armon1984; Reference Pascual-Leone, Marti and Rodriguez2012; Pascual-Leone & Johnson Reference Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Barrouillet and Gaillard2011), a principle that expresses the self-propelling disposition of schemes (brain circuits) with their spreading of activation in “multiple waves.” According to this principle, the full meaning of an object (e.g., face) is attained as multiple schemes with different modes and modalities of processing (located in different sites) become coactivated and rally together to overdetermine total meaning (the cognitive-emotional import) of the complex object in question. From this perspective, automatized and controlled processes – embodied in different cofunctional and coactivated scheme circuits – become combined and work together, as Pessoa points out, because they are part of a more complex (superordinate) scheme they have together constituted with life experience and neuroplasticity.
Pessoa offers new ideas on the neuroscience of cognition and emotion. We have added some new distinctions to neuropsychology relevant for neuroscience, which might help to improve Pessoa's theoretical framework.