How brains beware: neural mechanisms of emotional attention.

By Patrik Vuilleumier. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2005

2,210 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Emotional processes not only serve to record the value of sensory events, but also to elicit adaptive responses and modify perception. Recent research using functional brain imaging in human subjects has begun to reveal neural substrates by which sensory processing and attention can be modulated by the affective significance of stimuli. The amygdala plays a crucial role in providing both direct and indirect top-down signals on sensory pathways, which can influence the representation of emotional events, especially when related to threat. These modulatory effects implement specialized mechanisms of 'emotional attention' that might supplement but also compete with other sources of top-down control on perception. This work should help to elucidate the neural processes and temporal dynamics governing the integration of cognitive and affective influences in attention and behaviour.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/efdcc6a400bab0a2eca571b5d431a38ee3d7d247

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

When emotional valence modulates audiovisual integration (2012, neutral): “Interestingly, the PFC (particularly the orbitofrontal cortex, OFC) has been considered an important brain structure for crossmodal processing as well (Chavis & Pandya, 1976; Jones & Powell, 1970; Kringelbach, 2005).”
Angry faces hold the eyes (2011, background): “Several researchers have proposed that complex biological stimuli associated with threat trigger an automatic orienting response (Öhman & Mineka, 2001; Vuilleumier, 2005).”
Emotion and the Prefrontal Cortex: An Integrative Review (2017, neutral): “An object can be salient because of its intrinsic visual qualities (Itti & Koch, 2001), affective relevance (Anderson & Phelps, 2001; Markovic, Anderson, & Todd, 2014; Todd, Cunningham, Anderson, & Thompson, 2012; Vuilleumier, 2005), or relationship to current task demands (Corbetta & Shulman, 2002;”
Affective picture processing: an integrative review of ERP findings. (2008, background): “Theoretical advances are likely to benefit from integration across different neurophysiological methods and stimulus types (Vuilleumier, 2005).”
The perception and categorisation of emotional stimuli: A review (2010, background): “Taken together, these results show that the emotional quality of a diverse range of stimuli (such as words, pictures, or faces) can be extracted rapidly under suboptimal processing conditions and facilitate the further perceptual processing of the stimulus (Phelps, 2006; Vuilleumier, 2005).”
Recurrent Processing during Object Recognition (2013, neutral): “Valenceandemotionhavealsobeenshown affectperceptualprocessing,likelyduetofeedbackfromtheamyg-dalaandotherlimbicstructures(Vuilleumier,2005;Limand Pessoa,2008;PadmalaandPessoa,2008),butsofarnostudiesto .”
Neuroscientific Evidence for Simulation and Shared Substrates in Emotion Recognition: Beyond Faces (2009, background): “…distinct from task-related or purely stimulus-related attentional modulation; specifically, the emotional significance of stimuli triggers, via feedback connections from the amygdala, an enhancement or prioritization of their visual processing (e.g., Vuilleumier, 2005; Vuilleumier & Driver, 2007).”
Spiders at the cocktail party: An ancestral threat that surmounts inattentional blindness. (2015, background): “The brief display of test stimuli in the studies here, without forewarning or repetition, greatly reduced the extent that reentrant feedback from affective mechanisms could influence attention and perception (Vuilleumier, 2005).”
Emotion matters: Implications for distracted driving (2015, background): “Emotional stimuli have been widely reported to capture attention more readily than neutral stimuli (Compton, 2003; Vuilleumier, 2005).”
Customer experience in tourism: A review of definitions, components, and measurements (2020, neutral): “For example, Vuilleumier (2005) described the role of the amygdala in providing sensory signals, which influence the representation of emotions, while Sacco and Sacchetti (2010) explained the effects of sensory cortices on emotional responses.”
How do emotion and motivation direct executive control? (2009, background): “A considerable body of work has investigated how emotional stimuli are prioritized in terms of attentional processes [ 1 ].”
On the relationship between emotion and cognition (2008, background): “Such 'competitive advantage' also occurs during the viewing of emotion-laden visual stimul”
Reward modulates attention independently of action value in posterior parietal cortex (2009, positive): “In human subjects, stimuli with intrinsic emotional significance (e.g., fearful faces) automatically attract attention and modify visually evoked responses and psychophysical performance even when they are irrelevant to a task (Vuilleumier, 2005; Phelps et al., 2006; Padmala and Pessoa, 2008).”
Emotion processing and the amygdala: from a ‘low road’ to ‘many roads’ of evaluating biological significance (2010, critical): “This challenges the notion that emotional stimuli are processed automatically (see Ref”
From dual processes to multiple selves: Implications for economic behavior (2014, neutral): “For instance, attention can be guided in an automatic way by the amygdala when confronted with emotional stimuli (Vuilleumier, 2005) or in a controlled, goal-directed way via the dlPFC (Miller & Cohen, 2001).”