Effect of distracting faces on visual selective attention in the monkey

Landman, Rogier; Sharma, Jitendra; Sur, Mriganka; Desimone, Robert

doi:10.1073/pnas.1420167111

Cited by 33 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…In contrast, this source of competition is removed in the covert task (since only a single stimulus was presented). Indeed, unattended task-irrelevant peripheral faces can impair performance in a variety of settings (Landman et al, 2014) and it is possible that the reduction of selectivity we observed here is a reason for this effect.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 81%

Fixations Gate Species-Specific Responses to Free Viewing of Faces in the Human and Macaque Amygdala

et al. 2017

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Neurons in the primate amygdala respond prominently to faces. This implicates the amygdala in the processing of socially significant stimuli, yet its contribution to social perception remains poorly understood. We evaluated the representation of faces in the primate amygdala during naturalistic conditions by recording from both human-and macaque amygdala neurons during free viewing of identical arrays of images with concurrent eye tracking. Neurons responded to faces only when they were fixated, suggesting that neuronal activity was gated by visual attention. Further experiments in humans utilizing covert attention confirmed this hypothesis. In both species, the majority of face-selective neurons preferred faces of conspecifics, a bias also seen behaviorally in first fixation preferences. Response latencies, relative to fixation onset, were shortest for conspecific-selective neurons, and were ~100ms shorter in monkeys compared to humans. This argues that attention to faces gates amygdala responses, which in turn prioritize species-typical information for further processing.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 81%

Fixations Gate Species-Specific Responses to Free Viewing of Faces in the Human and Macaque Amygdala

et al. 2017

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“…Given the similarities between monkeys and humans in the neural circuitry underlying social cognition (19), the rhesus macaque could be an ideal animal model to examine the effects of OT. To date, only a few studies have investigated the behavioral consequences of OT administration in monkeys (20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25). Consistent with the human literature, these studies have found that intranasal administration of OT affects social behavior and cognition in monkeys, Significance Oxytocin (OT), a mammalian hormone, may serve as a treatment for psychiatric disorders because of its beneficial effect on social behavior.…”

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confidence: 83%

Oxytocin modulates fMRI responses to facial expression in macaques

Liu¹,

Hadj-Bouziane²,

Jones³

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Increasing evidence has shown that oxytocin (OT), a mammalian hormone, modifies the way social stimuli are perceived and the way they affect behavior. Thus, OT may serve as a treatment for psychiatric disorders, many of which are characterized by dysfunctional social behavior. To explore the neural mechanisms mediating the effects of OT in macaque monkeys, we investigated whether OT would modulate functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) responses in face-responsive regions (faces vs. blank screen) evoked by the perception of various facial expressions (neutral, fearful, aggressive, and appeasing). In the placebo condition, we found significantly increased activation for emotional (mainly fearful and appeasing) faces compared with neutral faces across the faceresponsive regions. OT selectively, and differentially, altered fMRI responses to emotional expressions, significantly reducing responses to both fearful and aggressive faces in face-responsive regions while leaving responses to appeasing as well as neutral faces unchanged. We also found that OT administration selectively reduced functional coupling between the amygdala and areas in the occipital and inferior temporal cortex during the viewing of fearful and aggressive faces, but not during the viewing of neutral or appeasing faces. Taken together, our results indicate homologies between monkeys and humans in the neural circuits mediating the effects of OT. Thus, the monkey may be an ideal animal model to explore the development of OT-based pharmacological strategies for treating patients with dysfunctional social behavior.oxytocin | neuroimaging | nonhuman primate | social stimuli I n the last decade, oxytocin (OT), a mammalian hormone, has become one of the most studied peptides of the neuroendocrine system. In humans, accumulating evidence has demonstrated that OT affects a wide range of social behavior and cognition, including perception, recognition and memory of social stimuli (1-5), socially reinforced learning (6), and more complex sociocognitive behaviors [e.g., trust (7,8), cooperation (9), generosity (10), and empathy (6, but see ref. 11)]. Therefore, it has been proposed that OT may serve as a treatment for various disorders with dysfunctional social behavior, such as autism spectrum disorders, antisocial personality disorder, and schizophrenia (for review, see ref. 12). A recent study found that OT enhances brain activity for socially meaningful stimuli but attenuates activity for nonsocially meaningful stimuli in children with autism spectrum disorders (13). Although these studies suggest very promising prospects of OT for clinical use, the neural mechanisms underlying OT's modulatory effects remain elusive. To understand these mechanisms, it is important to investigate the effect of OT on brain activity, especially in regions involved in social behavior and cognition.Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been the major approach to investigating altered brain activation patterns in response to OT in humans. OT may affect the per...

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“…Emotional stimuli, both negative and positive emotion, tend to attract attention in humans as well as other primates [21–26]. However, there is a critical distinction between the perceptual correlates of negative and positive emotions, with negative emotion narrowing and positive emotion broadening the scope of attention or perception [27–30].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Normalization Framework for Emotional Attention

et al. 2016

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The normalization model of attention proposes that attention can affect performance by response- or contrast-gain changes, depending on the size of the stimulus and attention field. Here, we manipulated the attention field by emotional valence, negative faces versus positive faces, while holding stimulus size constant in a spatial cueing task. We observed changes in the cueing effect consonant with changes in response gain for negative faces and contrast gain for positive faces. Neuroimaging experiments confirmed that subjects’ attention fields were narrowed for negative faces and broadened for positive faces. Importantly, across subjects, the self-reported emotional strength of negative faces and positive faces correlated, respectively, both with response- and contrast-gain changes and with primary visual cortex (V1) narrowed and broadened attention fields. Effective connectivity analysis showed that the emotional valence-dependent attention field was closely associated with feedback from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) to V1. These findings indicate a crucial involvement of DLPFC in the normalization processes of emotional attention.

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Effect of distracting faces on visual selective attention in the monkey

Cited by 33 publications

References 66 publications

Fixations Gate Species-Specific Responses to Free Viewing of Faces in the Human and Macaque Amygdala

Fixations Gate Species-Specific Responses to Free Viewing of Faces in the Human and Macaque Amygdala

Oxytocin modulates fMRI responses to facial expression in macaques

A Normalization Framework for Emotional Attention

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