Lesions of the human amygdala impair enhanced perception of emotionally salient events. Anderson, A. & Phelps, E. Nature, 411:305--309, May, 2001.
abstract   bibtex   
Commensurate with the importance of rapidly and efficiently evaluating motivationally significant stimuli, humans are probably endowed with distinct faculties and maintain specialized neural structures to enhance their detection. Here we consider that a critical function of the human amygdala is to enhance the perception of stimuli that have emotional significance. Under conditions of limited attention for normal perceptual awareness-that is, the attentional blink-we show that healthy observers demonstrate robust benefits for the perception of verbal stimuli of aversive content compared with stimuli of neutral content. In contrast, a patient with bilateral amygdala damage has no enhanced perception for such aversive stimulus events. Examination of patients with either left or right amygdala resections shows that the enhanced perception of aversive words depends specifically on the left amygdala. All patients comprehend normally the affective meaning of the stimulus events, despite the lack of evidence for enhanced perceptual encoding of these events in patients with left amygdala lesions. Our results reveal a neural substrate for affective influences on perception, indicating that similar neural mechanisms may underlie the affective modulation of both recollective and perceptual experience.
@article{ Anderson_Phelps01,
  author = {Anderson, A.K. and Phelps, E.A.},
  title = {{{L}esions of the human amygdala impair enhanced perception of emotionally
	salient events}},
  journal = {Nature},
  year = {2001},
  volume = {411},
  pages = {305--309},
  month = {May},
  abstract = {Commensurate with the importance of rapidly and efficiently evaluating
	motivationally significant stimuli, humans are probably endowed with
	distinct faculties and maintain specialized neural structures to
	enhance their detection. Here we consider that a critical function
	of the human amygdala is to enhance the perception of stimuli that
	have emotional significance. Under conditions of limited attention
	for normal perceptual awareness-that is, the attentional blink-we
	show that healthy observers demonstrate robust benefits for the perception
	of verbal stimuli of aversive content compared with stimuli of neutral
	content. In contrast, a patient with bilateral amygdala damage has
	no enhanced perception for such aversive stimulus events. Examination
	of patients with either left or right amygdala resections shows that
	the enhanced perception of aversive words depends specifically on
	the left amygdala. All patients comprehend normally the affective
	meaning of the stimulus events, despite the lack of evidence for
	enhanced perceptual encoding of these events in patients with left
	amygdala lesions. Our results reveal a neural substrate for affective
	influences on perception, indicating that similar neural mechanisms
	may underlie the affective modulation of both recollective and perceptual
	experience.}
}

Downloads: 0