Disorders of facial recognition, social behaviour and affect after combined bilateral amygdalotomy and subcaudate tractotomy - a clinical and experimental study

Neuropsychology of fear and loathing

“…In addition, cognitive impairments after amygdala damage are remarkably limited. Deficits have been found to affect some aspects of face perception [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] , particularly recognition of facial expression [11][12][13][14][15][17][18][19][20] , with less consistent evidence showing impaired learning of new faces 16,18,19 . Additional studies have shown that the amygdala is involved in memory for emotional material [21][22][23] .…”

“…Last, anecdotal reports indicate that bilateral amygdala lesions can disrupt the normal response to fear-provoking situations. However, this is not always expressed as a reduction, or even abolition of the response 16,19 , implying that the amygdala is not simply a fear generator. For example, the husband of a woman with bilateral amygdala damage described how his wife seemed to misinterpret the actions of youths who tried to mug him as 'larking around', whereas she became terrified on another occasion by a mildly aggressive exchange between characters in a television drama 19 .…”

Neuropsychological Correlates of Early Symptoms of Autism

“…This prediction was based on the hypothesis that early emerging symptoms of autism reflect core affective and social impairments that can be linked to dysfunction of the limbic system, particularly the amygdala and hippocampus and closely related brain regions, such as the orbital frontal region (see Dawson, 1996, for more elaborate discussion of this hypothesis). The animal and brain damage literatures suggest that the limbic system, particularly the amygdala, is critical for social perception, such as recognition of faces and facial expressions (Aggleton, 1992;Jacobson, 1986;Nelson & deHaan, 1996)) the recognition of the affective significance of stimuli (LeDoux, 1987), and the perception of body movements and gaze direction (Brothers, Ring, & Kling, 1990), and for certain cognitive abilities that are likely to be important for social perception, such as cross-modal association (Murray & Mishkin, 1985) and recall of event sequences (McDonough, Mandlers, McKee, & Squire, 1994). Furthermore, we theorized that such early dysfunction of the limbic system has "downstream" consequences for the development of higher-order prefrontal functions, including those associated with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.…”

Annotation: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Face Recognition: Implications for Developmental Disorders

“…Indeed, patients have been described who cannot learn new faces, but whose recognition of familiar faces appears less compromised (Tippett, Miller, & Farah, 2000). Jacobsen (1986) and Young et al (1995) describe patients with bilateral amygalectomies who are impaired at learning to recognise new faces. Once more, when unilateral lesions are considered, the right medial hippocampal system may be particularly implicated (Baxendale, 1997).…”