Landman Rogier, Sharma Jitendra, Sur Mriganka, Desimone Robert
McGovern Institute for Brain Research and
Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139; Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129; Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115; and.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Dec 16;111(50):18037-42. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1420167111. Epub 2014 Dec 3.
In primates, visual stimuli with social and emotional content tend to attract attention. Attention might be captured through rapid, automatic, subcortical processing or guided by slower, more voluntary cortical processing. Here we examined whether irrelevant faces with varied emotional expressions interfere with a covert attention task in macaque monkeys. In the task, the monkeys monitored a target grating in the periphery for a subtle color change while ignoring distracters that included faces appearing elsewhere on the screen. The onset time of distracter faces before the target change, as well as their spatial proximity to the target, was varied from trial to trial. The presence of faces, especially faces with emotional expressions interfered with the task, indicating a competition for attentional resources between the task and the face stimuli. However, this interference was significant only when faces were presented for greater than 200 ms. Emotional faces also affected saccade velocity and reduced pupillary reflex. Our results indicate that the attraction of attention by emotional faces in the monkey takes a considerable amount of processing time, possibly involving cortical-subcortical interactions. Intranasal application of the hormone oxytocin ameliorated the interfering effects of faces. Together these results provide evidence for slow modulation of attention by emotional distracters, which likely involves oxytocinergic brain circuits.
在灵长类动物中，具有社会和情感内容的视觉刺激往往会吸引注意力。注意力可能通过快速、自动的皮层下处理被捕获，或者由较慢、更自主的皮层处理引导。在这里，我们研究了具有不同情感表情的无关面孔是否会干扰猕猴的一项隐蔽注意力任务。在该任务中，猴子监测外周的目标光栅以检测微妙的颜色变化，同时忽略包括出现在屏幕其他位置的面孔在内的干扰物。每次试验中，干扰面孔在目标变化之前的出现时间以及它们与目标的空间距离都会有所不同。面孔的存在，尤其是带有情感表情的面孔，会干扰任务，这表明任务和面孔刺激之间存在对注意力资源的竞争。然而，这种干扰只有在面孔呈现超过200毫秒时才显著。情感面孔还会影响扫视速度并降低瞳孔反射。我们的结果表明，猴子中情感面孔吸引注意力需要相当长的处理时间，可能涉及皮层 - 皮层下相互作用。鼻内应用激素催产素可改善面孔的干扰作用。这些结果共同为情感干扰物对注意力的缓慢调节提供了证据，这可能涉及催产素能脑回路。
