Adolphs Ralph
Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.
Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2008 Apr;18(2):166-72. doi: 10.1016/j.conb.2008.06.006. Epub 2008 Aug 12.
The amygdala's historical role in processing stimuli related to threat and fear is being modified to suggest a role that is broader and more abstract. Amygdala lesions impair the ability to seek out and make use of the eye region of faces, resulting in impaired fear perception. Other studies in rats and humans revive earlier proposals that the amygdala is important not only for fear perception as such, but also for detecting saliency and biological relevance. Debates about some features of this processing now suggest that while the amygdala can process fearful facial expressions in the absence of conscious perception, and while there is some degree of preattentive processing, this depends on the context and is not necessarily more rapid than cortical processing routes. A large current research effort extends the amygdala's putative role to a number of psychiatric illnesses.
杏仁核在处理与威胁和恐惧相关刺激方面的历史作用正在被修正，以表明其作用更为广泛和抽象。杏仁核损伤会损害寻找并利用面部眼部区域的能力，从而导致恐惧感知受损。对大鼠和人类的其他研究重新提出了早期的观点，即杏仁核不仅对于恐惧感知本身很重要，而且对于检测显著性和生物学相关性也很重要。目前关于这种处理的一些特征的争论表明，虽然杏仁核可以在无意识感知的情况下处理恐惧的面部表情，并且存在一定程度的前注意处理，但这取决于具体情境，并不一定比皮层处理路径更快。当前大量的研究工作将杏仁核的假定作用扩展到了多种精神疾病。
