Attention to Stimuli of Learned versus Innate Biological Value Relies on Separate Neural Systems.

Autor:	Kaskan PM; Leo M. Davidoff Department of Neurological Surgery, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York 10461., Nicholas MA; Section on Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Laboratory of Neuropsychology, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892., Dean AM; Section on Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Laboratory of Neuropsychology, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892., Murray EA; Section on Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Laboratory of Neuropsychology, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892 murraye@mail.nih.gov.
Jazyk:	angličtina
Zdroj:	The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience [J Neurosci] 2022 Dec 07; Vol. 42 (49), pp. 9242-9252. Date of Electronic Publication: 2022 Nov 01.
DOI:	10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0925-22.2022
Abstrakt:	The neural bases of attention, a set of neural processes that promote behavioral selection, is a subject of intense investigation. In humans, rewarded cues influence attention, even when those cues are irrelevant to the current task. Because the amygdala plays a role in reward processing, and the activity of amygdala neurons has been linked to spatial attention, we reasoned that the amygdala may be essential for attending to rewarded images. To test this possibility, we used an attentional capture task, which provides a quantitative measure of attentional bias. Specifically, we compared reaction times (RTs) of adult male rhesus monkeys with bilateral amygdala lesions and unoperated controls as they made a saccade away from a high- or low-value rewarded image to a peripheral target. We predicted that: (1) RTs will be longer for high- compared with low-value images, revealing attentional capture by rewarded stimuli; and (2) relative to controls, monkeys with amygdala lesions would exhibit shorter RT for high-value images. For comparison, we assessed the same groups of monkeys for attentional capture by images of predators and conspecifics, categories thought to have innate biological value. In performing the attentional capture task, all monkeys were slowed more by high-value relative to low-value rewarded images. Contrary to our prediction, amygdala lesions failed to disrupt this effect. When presented with images of predators and conspecifics, however, monkeys with amygdala lesions showed significantly diminished attentional capture relative to controls. Thus, separate neural pathways are responsible for allocating attention to stimuli with learned versus innate value. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Valuable objects attract attention. The amygdala is known to contribute to reward processing and the encoding of object reward value. We therefore examined whether the amygdala is necessary for allocating attention to rewarded objects. For comparison, we assessed the amygdala's contribution to attending to objects with innate biological value: predators and conspecifics. We found that the macaque amygdala is necessary for directing attention to images with innate biological value, but not for directing attention to recently learned reward-predictive images. These findings indicate that the amygdala makes selective contributions to attending to valuable objects. The data are relevant to mental health disorders, such as social anxiety disorders and small animal phobias, that arise from biased attention to select categories of objects. (Copyright © 2022 Kaskan, Nicholas et al.)
Databáze:	MEDLINE
Externí odkaz:	Zobrazit plný text záznamu