Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2011 Oct;49(12):3314-9. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.08.004. Epub 2011 Aug 11.
The importance of cues signaling reward, threat or danger would suggest that they receive processing privileges in the neural systems underlying perception and attention. Previous research has documented enhanced processing of motivationally salient cues, and has pointed to the amygdala as a candidate neural structure underlying the enhancements. In the current study, we examined whether the amygdala was necessary for this emotional modulation of attention to occur. Patients with unilateral amygdala lesions and matched controls completed an emotional attentional blink task in which emotional distractors impair the perception of subsequent targets. Emotional images proved more distracting across all participant groups, including those with right or left amygdala lesions. These data argue against a central role for the amygdala in mediating all types of attentional capture by emotional stimuli.
提示信号奖励、威胁或危险的重要性表明，它们在感知和注意力的基础神经系统中获得处理优先权。先前的研究记录了对动机显著提示的增强处理，并指出杏仁核是潜在增强的候选神经结构。在当前的研究中，我们研究了杏仁核是否对这种情绪调节注意力的发生是必要的。单侧杏仁核损伤的患者和匹配的对照组完成了一个情绪注意瞬脱任务，其中情绪分心物会损害对后续目标的感知。在所有参与者群体中，包括右侧或左侧杏仁核损伤的参与者，情绪图像的干扰作用更大。这些数据表明，杏仁核在介导情绪刺激引起的各种注意力捕获方面的作用并不重要。
