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.}
}
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