The roles of the amygdala in the affective regulation of body, brain, and behaviour

By Marco Mirolli, Francesco Mannella, Gianluca Baldassarre. 2010

40 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite the great amount of knowledge produced by the neuroscientific literature on affective phenomena, current models tackling non-cognitive aspects of behaviour are often bio-inspired but rarely bio-constrained. This paper presents a theoretical account of affective systems centred on the amygdala (Amg). This account aims to furnish a general framework and specific pathways to implement models that are more closely related to biological evidence. The Amg, which receives input from brain areas encoding internal states, innately relevant stimuli, and innately neutral stimuli, plays a fundamental role in the motivational and emotional processes of organisms. This role is based on the fact that Amg implements the two associative processes at the core of Pavlovian learning (conditioned stimulus (CS)–unconditioned stimulus (US) and CS–unconditioned response (UR) associations), and that it has the capacity of modulating these associations on the basis of internal states. These functionalities allow the Amg to play an important role in the regulation of the three fundamental classes of affective responses (namely, the regulation of body states, the regulation of brain states via neuromodulators, and the triggering of a number of basic behaviours fundamental for adaptation) and in the regulation of three high-level cognitive processes (namely, the affective labelling of memories, the production of goal-directed behaviours, and the performance of planning and complex decision-making). Our analysis is conducted within a methodological approach that stresses the importance of understanding the brain within an evolutionary/adaptive framework and with the aim of isolating general principles that can potentially account for the wider possible empirical evidence in a coherent fashion.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

What can the brain teach us about building artificial intelligence? (2016, background): “, 2011), and the limbic brain structures interfacing the brain to the body and generating motivations, emotions, and the value of things (Mogenson et al., 1980; Mirolli et al., 2010).”
What are intrinsic motivations? A biological perspective (2011, background): “There are other important areas underlying homeostic regulations but we focus on Hyp for simplicity: see for example [22] on the functions played by amygdala.”
The Hierarchical Organisation of Cortical and Basal-Ganglia Systems: A Computationally-Informed Review and Integrated Hypothesis (2013, unknown): “At the highest level, the hierarchy also involves the amygdala complex (Mirolli et al., 2010; Pitkänen et al., 1997) and the hippocampal system (Bast, 2007; Lisman and Grace, 2005; Voorn et al., 2004) as generators of motivations and as loci of associations between objects/experiences and their…”
Intrinsically motivated action-outcome learning and goal-based action recall: a system-level bio-constrained computational model. (2013, background): “This activation, which mimics the attribution of values to the PFC outcomes by subcortical regions such as Amg, allows testing the capacity of the model to recall actions via the associated goals (see Mannella et al., 2010; Daw et al., 2005, for more biologically plausible models of this process).”