Brain mechanisms for emotional influences on perception and attention: What is magic and what is not

Abstract

The rapid and efficient selection of emotionally-salient or goal-relevant stimuli in the environment is crucial for flexible and adaptive behaviors. Converging data from neuroscience and psychology have accrued during the last decade to identify brain systems involved in emotion processing, selective attention, and their interaction, which together act to extract the emotional or motivational value of sensory events and respond appropriately. An important hub in these systems is the amygdala, which may not only monitor the emotional value of stimuli, but also readily project to several other areas and send feedback to sensory pathways (including striate and extrastriate visual cortex). This system generates saliency signals that modulate perceptual, motor, as well as memory processes, and thus in turn regulate behavior appropriately.Here, we review our current views on the function and properties of these brain systems, with an emphasis on their involvement in the rapid and/or preferential processing of threat-relevant stimuli. We suggest that emotion signals may enhance processing efficiency and competitive strength of emotionally significant events through gain control mechanisms similar to those of other (e.g. endogenous) attentional systems, but mediated by distinct neural mechanisms in amygdala and interconnected prefrontal areas. Alterations in these brain mechanisms might be associated with psychopathological conditions, such as anxiety or phobia. We conclude that attention selection and awareness are determined by multiple attention gain control systems that may operate in parallel and use different sensory cues but act on a common perceptual pathway.

How motivation and reward learning modulate selective attention

“…This effect occurred despite the concurrent attentional cues, either endogenous or exogenous, suggesting that reward is a powerful determinant of attentional selection that can mitigate the attentional orienting induced by other endogenous or exogenous signals. All together, these results suggest multiple, partly independent sources of modulation on visual orienting, which appear functionally and anatomically distinct from attentional systems classically associated with frontoparietal cortical networks in the brain (see also Pourtois et al, 2012, for similar modulations of attention by threat-related information).…”

Attentional bias to affective faces and complex IAPS images in early visual cortex follows emotional cue extraction

“…One possibility is that competition for attentional resources in early visual cortex is preceded by emotional content extraction, and the rather slow biasing observed using the SSVEP might be due to feedback (Pourtois et al 2013) or re-entrant mechanisms (Keil et al 2009). The visual evoked potential (VEP) elicited by IAPS images offers a method to test this hypothesis.…”

Modulation of brain response to emotional conflict as a function of current mood in bipolar disorder: Preliminary findings from a follow-up state-based fMRI study

“…In this task, verbal affective labels were superimposed on fearful and joyful faces, producing either congruent or incongruent emotion conditions. In addition, we manipulated the cognitive demand across two task conditions (easy and hard) to examine whether attentional resource availability can modify the effect of emotion interference (Pourtois et al, 2013). We expected that this paradigm would modulate lateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate networks which are reliably modulated by emotional as well as non-emotional conflict conditions (Roberts and Hall, 2008;Chechko et al, 2012).…”