A fast pathway for fear in human amygdala

Méndez‐Bértolo, Constantino; Moratti, Stephan; Toledano, Rafael; López-Sosa, Fernando; Martínez‐Álvarez, Roberto; Mah, Yee H; Vuilleumier, Patrik; Gil‐Nagel, Antonio; Strange, Bryan A.

doi:10.1038/nn.4324

Cited by 297 publications

(280 citation statements)

References 62 publications

(66 reference statements)

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“…More importantly, this effect was reported for unfiltered faces and for LSF stimuli, while the HSF stimuli failed to produce this result (Vuilleumier et al, 2003). Similarly, intracranial recordings carried out in patients during their work-up for surgical alleviation of their epileptic seizures revealed early-latency amygdala activation for fearful faces that remained present for stimuli when the high spatial frequencies, but not the low spatial frequencies, were removed (Mendez-Bertolo et al, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Affective blindsight relies on low spatial frequencies

et al. 2019

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The human brain can process facial expressions of emotions rapidly and without awareness. Several studies in patients with damage to their primary visual cortices have shown that they may be able to guess the emotional expression on a face despite their cortical blindness. This non-conscious processing, called affective blindsight, may arise through an intact subcortical visual route that leads from the superior colliculus to the pulvinar, and thence to the amygdala. This pathway is thought to process the crude visual information conveyed by the low spatial frequencies of the stimuli.In order to investigate whether this is the case, we studied a patient (TN) with bilateral cortical blindness and affective blindsight. An fMRI paradigm was performed in which fearful and happy expressions were presented using faces that were either unfiltered, or filtered to remove high or low spatial frequencies. Unfiltered fearful faces produced right amygdala activation although the patient was unaware of the presence of the stimuli. More BLINDSIGHT AND SPATIAL FREQUENCIES 2 importantly, the low spatial frequency components of fearful faces continued to produce right amygdala activity while the high spatial frequency components did not. Our findings thus confirm that the visual information present in the low spatial frequencies is sufficient to produce affective blindsight, further suggesting that its existence could rely on the subcortical colliculo-pulvino-amygdalar pathway.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Affective blindsight relies on low spatial frequencies

et al. 2019

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“…However, there is some debate on how such rapid perception is accomplished. A fast subcortical thalamus‐amygdala route bypassing the visual cortex is thought to transmit coarse face‐related information (LeDoux, 2009; Morris et al, 1998), but its role in face perception is controversial (Krolak‐Salmon et al, 2004; Pessoa & Adolphs, 2011), including whether it is fear‐specific (Méndez‐Bértolo et al, 2016) or non‐specific to expression (Garvert, Friston, Dolan, & Garrido, 2014; McFadyen et al, 2017). On the other hand, multiple fast cortical pathways forming part of a feedforward and feedback mechanism consistute an equally plausible mechanism for rapid expression perception (Liu & Ioannides, 2010; Pessoa & Adolphs, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatiotemporal dynamics in human visual cortex rapidly encode the emotional content of faces

Dima

Perry

Messaritaki

et al. 2018

Human Brain Mapping

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Recognizing emotion in faces is important in human interaction and survival, yet existing studies do not paint a consistent picture of the neural representation supporting this task. To address this, we collected magnetoencephalography (MEG) data while participants passively viewed happy, angry and neutral faces. Using time‐resolved decoding of sensor‐level data, we show that responses to angry faces can be discriminated from happy and neutral faces as early as 90 ms after stimulus onset and only 10 ms later than faces can be discriminated from scrambled stimuli, even in the absence of differences in evoked responses. Time‐resolved relevance patterns in source space track expression‐related information from the visual cortex (100 ms) to higher‐level temporal and frontal areas (200–500 ms). Together, our results point to a system optimised for rapid processing of emotional faces and preferentially tuned to threat, consistent with the important evolutionary role that such a system must have played in the development of human social interactions.

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“…The second is the amygdala (AM), which produces fear when stimulated in humans 7,8 ; the presentation of fearful facial expressions triggers faster and stronger responses relative to other facial expressions 9,10 ; selective bilateral destruction of AM (Urbach-Wiethe disease) produces an impaired, abnormal experience of fear 11,12 . These patients do not feel fear but are able to describe cognitively what fear is 13 .…”

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confidence: 99%