Department of Biological and Clinical Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Am Steiger 3/1, D-07743 Jena, Germany.
Neuroimage. 2012 Oct 15;63(1):485-90. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.07.005. Epub 2012 Jul 14.
Visual perceptual load has been shown to modulate brain activation to emotional facial expressions. However, it is unknown whether cross-modal effects of visual perceptual load on brain activation to threat-related auditory stimuli also exist. The current fMRI study investigated brain responses to angry and neutral voices while subjects had to solve an easy or a demanding visual task. Although the easy visual condition was associated with increased activation in the right superior temporal region to angry vs. neutral prosody, this effect was absent during the demanding task. Thus, our results show that cross-modal perceptual load modulates the activation to emotional voices in the auditory cortex and that high visual load prevents the increased processing of emotional prosody.
视觉感知负荷已被证明可以调节大脑对情绪面部表情的激活。然而，目前尚不清楚视觉感知负荷对与威胁相关的听觉刺激的大脑激活是否存在跨模态效应。本 fMRI 研究在被试进行简单或困难的视觉任务时，考察了大脑对愤怒和中性声音的反应。虽然在简单视觉条件下，右颞上回对愤怒与中性韵律的激活增加，但在困难任务时则不存在这种效应。因此，我们的结果表明，跨模态感知负荷调节了听觉皮层对情绪声音的激活，而高视觉负荷则阻止了对情绪韵律的增强处理。
