Introduction

A fundamental question in the fields of neuroscience and cognition science is: how the brain works for sensing, processing and handling the information from external stimulus, especially for emotion-laden stimuli. For the purpose of sustaining life, animal have its one of the basic abilities to detect the "biological significance" of affective stimuli and decide to approach or avoid from it, but the neural mechanisms underlying these general behavioral phenomena remains largely unclear.By utilizing a combination of optogenetics manipulation, in vivo electrophysiologicaland behavioral recording, we previously dissected a subcortical colliculus-pulvinar-amygdala pathway to mediate visually threat evoked innate fear responses. Currently, our major research fields include: 1) To investigate the cell-types specific neuronal circuits of the subcortical pathways for different classes or components of innate defensive reactions, 2) To understand the neural coding mechanismsfor visual threat signal (overhead looming) processing.