Department of Neural Systems, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, 60528 Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Curr Biol. 2011 Oct 11;21(19):1654-60. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.08.035. Epub 2011 Sep 29.
The human amygdala is critical for social cognition from faces, as borne out by impairments in recognizing facial emotion following amygdala lesions [1] and differential activation of the amygdala by faces [2-5]. Single-unit recordings in the primate amygdala have documented responses selective for faces, their identity, or emotional expression [6, 7], yet how the amygdala represents face information remains unknown. Does it encode specific features of faces that are particularly critical for recognizing emotions (such as the eyes), or does it encode the whole face, a level of representation that might be the proximal substrate for subsequent social cognition? We investigated this question by recording from over 200 single neurons in the amygdalae of seven neurosurgical patients with implanted depth electrodes [8]. We found that approximately half of all neurons responded to faces or parts of faces. Approximately 20% of all neurons responded selectively only to the whole face. Although responding most to whole faces, these neurons paradoxically responded more when only a small part of the face was shown compared to when almost the entire face was shown. We suggest that the human amygdala plays a predominant role in representing global information about faces, possibly achieved through inhibition between individual facial features.
人类杏仁核对于从面部识别社会认知至关重要，这一点从杏仁核损伤后对面部情绪的识别障碍[1]以及面部对杏仁核的不同激活[2-5]中得到了证明。灵长类动物杏仁核的单细胞记录已经记录了对人脸、其身份或表情的选择性反应[6,7]，但杏仁核如何表示人脸信息仍然未知。它是否编码对于识别情绪特别关键的人脸的特定特征（例如眼睛），还是编码整个面部，这一级别的表示可能是后续社会认知的近端基质？我们通过记录七个接受植入深度电极的神经外科患者的杏仁核中的 200 多个单个神经元来研究这个问题[8]。我们发现，大约一半的神经元对人脸或人脸的某些部分有反应。大约 20%的神经元只对整个脸有选择性反应。尽管这些神经元对整个脸的反应最强烈，但与显示整个脸相比，当只显示脸的一小部分时，它们的反应反而更强烈。我们认为，人类杏仁核在表示关于人脸的全局信息方面起着主导作用，这可能是通过个体面部特征之间的抑制来实现的。
