Unilateral amygdala lesions hamper attentional orienting triggered by gaze direction

Tomoko Akiyama, Motoichiro Kato, Taro Muramatsu, Satoshi Umeda, Fumie Saito, Haruo Kashima

研究成果: Article査読

57 被引用数 (Scopus)

抄録

The newly discovered deficit in a bilateral amygdala-damaged case, of not being able to allocate attention to the critical feature of a face (Adolphs R, Gosselin F, Buchanan TW, Tranel D, Schyns P, Damasio AR. 2005. A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage. Nature. 433:68 - 72.), has opened a new window into the function of the amygdala. This case implies that the amygdala might be essential in detecting potentially relevant social stimuli, and directing attention accordingly. In this study, we have sought to test this implication by investigating the behavioral performance of 5 unilateral amygdala-damaged subjects on spatial cueing tasks. The tasks employed central gaze and arrow direction as cues to trigger attentional orienting in peripheral target detection. Although age-matched normal controls demonstrated a significant congruency effect such that targets presented congruently to cue direction elicited faster detection, amygdala subjects demonstrated no such congruency effect for gaze cues in the face of a significant congruency effect for arrow cues. The results suggest that the social valence of a stimulus is critical for amygdala involvement in visual processing. The results also support the implicated role of the amygdala in detecting and analyzing relevant social stimuli, and orienting attention accordingly.

本文言語English
ページ(範囲)2593-2600
ページ数8
ジャーナルCerebral Cortex
17
11
DOI
出版ステータスPublished - 2007 11月

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • 認知神経科学
  • 細胞および分子神経科学

フィンガープリント

「Unilateral amygdala lesions hamper attentional orienting triggered by gaze direction」の研究トピックを掘り下げます。これらがまとまってユニークなフィンガープリントを構成します。

引用スタイル