Akiyama Tomoko, Kato Motoichiro, Muramatsu Taro, Umeda Satoshi, Saito Fumie, Kashima Haruo
Department of Psychiatry, Komagino Hospital, Tokyo, Japan.
Cereb Cortex. 2007 Nov;17(11):2593-600. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhl166. Epub 2007 Jan 11.
The newly discovered deficit in a bilateral amygdala-damaged case, of not being able to allocate attention to the critical feature of a face (Adolphs R, Gosselin F, Buchanan TW, Tranel D, Schyns P, Damasio AR. 2005. A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage. Nature. 433:68--72.), has opened a new window into the function of the amygdala. This case implies that the amygdala might be essential in detecting potentially relevant social stimuli, and directing attention accordingly. In this study, we have sought to test this implication by investigating the behavioral performance of 5 unilateral amygdala-damaged subjects on spatial cueing tasks. The tasks employed central gaze and arrow direction as cues to trigger attentional orienting in peripheral target detection. Although age-matched normal controls demonstrated a significant congruency effect such that targets presented congruently to cue direction elicited faster detection, amygdala subjects demonstrated no such congruency effect for gaze cues in the face of a significant congruency effect for arrow cues. The results suggest that the social valence of a stimulus is critical for amygdala involvement in visual processing. The results also support the implicated role of the amygdala in detecting and analyzing relevant social stimuli, and orienting attention accordingly.
在一例双侧杏仁核受损的病例中，新发现的缺陷是无法将注意力分配到面部的关键特征上（阿道夫斯R、戈斯林F、布坎南TW、特拉内尔D、申斯P、达马西奥AR。2005年。杏仁核损伤后恐惧识别受损的机制。《自然》。433:68 - 72），这为研究杏仁核的功能打开了一扇新窗口。该病例表明，杏仁核在检测潜在相关的社会刺激并相应地引导注意力方面可能至关重要。在本研究中，我们试图通过调查5名单侧杏仁核受损受试者在空间线索任务中的行为表现来验证这一观点。这些任务采用中央注视和箭头方向作为线索，以触发外周目标检测中的注意力定向。尽管年龄匹配的正常对照组表现出显著的一致性效应，即与线索方向一致呈现的目标引发更快的检测，但杏仁核受损受试者面对箭头线索的显著一致性效应时，对注视线索却没有这种一致性效应。结果表明，刺激的社会效价对于杏仁核参与视觉加工至关重要。结果还支持了杏仁核在检测和分析相关社会刺激并相应地引导注意力方面的牵连作用。
