Impaired emotional biases in visual attention after bilateral amygdala lesion
| Autor: | Judith Domínguez-Borràs, M. Moyne, Patrik Vuilleumier, Arnaud Saj, Raphael Guex |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
medicine.medical_specialty
Cognitive Neuroscience Emotions Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Audiology Hippocampal formation Amygdala Attentional Blink Hippocampus 050105 experimental psychology Lesion 03 medical and health sciences Behavioral Neuroscience Brain damage 0302 clinical medicine Atenció Neuroplasticity medicine Visual attention Humans 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Attentional blink Cognitive Dysfunction Attention Visual search Emotion 05 social sciences Emocions Middle Aged ddc:616.8 Amygdaloid body medicine.anatomical_structure Cos amigdaloide Medial temporal lobe Lesions cerebrals Facilitation Female Encephalitis Herpes Simplex medicine.symptom Psychology Facial Recognition 030217 neurology & neurosurgery |
| Zdroj: | Dipòsit Digital de la UB Universidad de Barcelona Neuropsychologia, Vol. 137 (2020) P. 107292 |
| ISSN: | 0028-3932 |
| Popis: | It is debated whether the amygdala is critical for the emotional modulation of attention. While some studies show reduced attentional benefits for emotional stimuli in amygdala-damaged patients, others report preserved emotional effects. Various factors may account for these discrepant findings, including the temporal onset of the lesion, the completeness and severity of tissue damage, or the extent of neural plasticity and compensatory mechanisms, among others. Here, we investigated a rare patient with focal acute destruction of bilateral amygdala and adjacent hippocampal structures after late-onset herpetic encephalitis in adulthood. We compared her performance in two classic visual attention paradigms with that of healthy controls. First, we tested for any emotional advantage during an attentional blink task. Whereas controls showed better report of fearful and happy than neutral faces on trials with short lags between targets, the patient showed no emotional advantage, but also globally reduced report rates for all faces. Second, to ensure that memory disturbance due to hippocampal damage would not interfere with report performance, we also used a visual search task with either emotionally or visually salient face targets. Although the patient still exhibited efficient guided search for visually salient, non-emotional faces, her search slopes for emotional versus neutral faces showed no comparable benefit. In both tasks, however, changes in the patient predominated for happy more than fear stimuli, despite her normal explicit recognition of happy expressions. Our results provide new support for a causal role of the amygdala in emotional facilitation of visual attention, especially under conditions of increasing task-demands, and not limited to negative information. In addition, our data suggest that such deficits may not be amenable to plasticity and compensation, perhaps due to sudden and late-onset damage occurring in adulthood. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
|
Full Text from ScienceDirect