Fate of unattended fearful faces in the amygdala is determined by both attentional resources and cognitive modulation

By Luiz Pessoa, Srikanth Padmala, Thomas M. Moerland. NeuroImage, 2005

370 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The evidence for amygdala processing of emotional items outside the focus of attention is mixed. We hypothesized that differences in attentional demands may, at least in part, explain prior discrepancies. In the present study, attention was manipulated by parametrically varying the difficulty of a central task, allowing us to compare responses evoked by unattended emotion-laden faces while the attentional load of a central task was varied. Reduced responses to unattended emotional stimuli may also reflect an active suppression of amygdala responses during difficult non-emotional tasks (cognitive modulation). To explicitly assess cognitive modulation, an experimental condition was used in which subjects performed the central task without the presence of irrelevant emotional stimuli. Our findings revealed that amygdala responses were modulated by the focus of attention. Stronger responses were evoked during a sex task (when faces were attended) relative to a bar-orientation task (when faces were unattended). Critically, a valence effect was observed in the right amygdala during low attentional demand conditions, but not during medium or high demand conditions. Moreover, performing a difficult non-emotional task alone was associated with signal decreases in a network of brain regions, including the amygdala. Such robust decreases demonstrate that cognitive modulation comprises a powerful factor in determining amygdala responses. Collectively, our findings reveal that both attentional resources and cognitive modulation govern the fate of unattended fearful faces in the amygdala.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dd855d12f395e2067bfb01f28adf29a5856e2457

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Evolutionary derived modulations of attention to two common fear stimuli: Serpents and hostile humans (2012, background): “However, at high perceptual load, such distraction effects diminish or disappear, along with associated activation in brain regions such as the amygdala (e.g., Bishop et al., 2006; Lim, Padmala, & Pessoa, 2008; Pessoa et al., 2005).”
Reduced resting-state functional connectivity between amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex in social anxiety disorder (2011, background): “…and medial prefrontal cortices (Fox et al., 2005; Greicius et al., 2003)), relates to self-referential functions including mood and emotion as well as reactions to such stimuli (Pessoa et al., 2005; Saleem et al., 2008) and has been implicated in pathological anxiety (Simpson et al., 2001).”
How brains beware: neural mechanisms of emotional attention. (2005, background): “Moreover, the amygdala might fail to influence the cortex when emotional signals are too weak [48] or suppressed by high perceptual competition [16,26, 56 ].”
Automatic and controlled processes and the development of addictive behaviors in adolescents: a review and a model. (2007, background): “…recent fMRI studies have indicated that also for the detection of fear eliciting stimuli a minimal level of attention and awareness are necessary (Pessoa et al., 2005b, 2006), after controlling for individual differences in the ability to detect briefly presented stimuli (Pessoa et al., 2005a).”
Are you always on my mind? A review of how face perception and attention interact. (2007, background): “Indeed, a recent dy by Pessoa, Padmala, and Morland (2005) with centrally sented faces demonstrates greater (right) amygdala activation fearful than neutral faces under low, but not medium or high, entional load conditions.”
Modulation of emotion by cognition and cognition by emotion (2007, background): “Thus, Pessoa and colleagues found that the amygdala response to fearful faces was modulated by the degree of attention directed towards them (Pessoa et al., 2002, 2005).”