Department of Biological and Clinical Psychology, Friedrich-Schiller-University, D-07743 Jena, Germany.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2010 Oct;31(10):1601-8. doi: 10.1002/hbm.20960.
Recently, it has been suggested that backwardly masked, and thus subliminally presented, fearful eyes are processed by the amygdala. Here, we investigated in four functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments whether the amygdala responds to subliminally presented fearful eyes per se or whether an interaction of masked eyes with the masks or with parts of the masks used for backward masking might be responsible for the amygdala activation. In these experiments, we varied the mask as well as the position of the target eyes. The results show that the amygdala does not respond to masked fearful eyes per se but to an interaction between masked fearful eyes and the eyes of neutral faces used for masking. This finding questions the hypothesis that the amygdala processes context-free parts of the human face without awareness.
最近有研究表明，被掩蔽的、处于潜意识下的恐惧眼神会被杏仁核处理。在这里，我们通过四个功能性磁共振成像实验研究了杏仁核是否会对潜意识下呈现的恐惧眼神做出反应，还是掩蔽的眼睛与掩蔽本身或者用于掩蔽的掩蔽部分的相互作用会导致杏仁核的激活。在这些实验中，我们改变了掩蔽和目标眼睛的位置。结果表明，杏仁核对掩蔽的恐惧眼神本身没有反应，而是对掩蔽的恐惧眼神和用于掩蔽的中性面孔的眼睛之间的相互作用有反应。这一发现质疑了杏仁核在无意识的情况下处理人脸无上下文部分的假设。
