Amygdala-hippocampal dynamics during salient information processing

Abstract

Recognizing motivationally salient information is critical to guiding behaviour. The amygdala and hippocampus are thought to support this operation, but the circuit-level mechanism of this interaction is unclear. We used direct recordings in the amygdala and hippocampus from human epilepsy patients to examine oscillatory activity during processing of fearful faces compared with neutral landscapes. We report high gamma (70–180 Hz) activation for fearful faces with earlier stimulus evoked onset in the amygdala compared with the hippocampus. Attending to fearful faces compared with neutral landscape stimuli enhances low-frequency coupling between the amygdala and the hippocampus. The interaction between the amygdala and hippocampus is largely unidirectional, with theta/alpha oscillations in the amygdala modulating hippocampal gamma activity. Granger prediction, phase slope index and phase lag analysis corroborate this directional coupling. These results demonstrate that processing emotionally salient events in humans engages an amygdala-hippocampal network, with the amygdala influencing hippocampal dynamics during fear processing.

Mapping social reward and punishment processing in the human brain: A voxel-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging findings using the Social Incentive Delay task

“…The dorsal cingulate is a region that subserves both cognition and motor control (Beckmann et al, 2009) and a plethora of studies have implicated this area in processes such as attention for action/target selection (Hayden and Platt, 2010;Isomura et al, 2003), motivation (Monosov, 2017), motor response selection (Badgaiyan and Posner, 1998), performance monitoring (Gehring and Knight, 2000), novelty detection (Hayden et al, 2011) and social cognition (namely, in tracking others' motivation) (Apps et al, 2016). Lastly, the amygdala, which has been classically linked with negative emotional processing, has more recently been proposed to respond to stimulus salience/arousal rather than valence (Bonnet et al, 2015;Fastenrath et al, 2014;Zheng et al, 2017). In addition, the amygdala has also been proposed to be instrumental during the processing of emotional and socially relevant information (including the processing of emotions from faces (Todorov, 2012b)).…”

Pain-related fear – Dissociable neural sources of different fear constructs

“…The thalamus and particularly its midline structures have been considered to be a non-specific arousing system (van der Werf et al, 2002). However, it has been recently shown that parts of dorsal midline thalamic structures are necessary for fear memory processing by directly targeting the hippocampus, which plays an important role for context-dependent emotional memory (Penzo et al, 2015;Lara-Vásquez et al, 2016;Zheng et al, 2017). On the other hand, the amygdala has long been considered a "fear center" (Panksepp, 1998;Darwin, 1873).…”

Convergence of cortical types and functional motifs in the mesiotemporal lobe

“…The mesiotemporal lobe (MTL) is implicated in a diverse range of cognitive processes, notably memory, navigation, socio-affective processing, and higher-order perception 1,2,11,[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] . Contemporary views recognise that the broad role this region plays in human cognition emerges through interactions between neural codes within the MTL and the rest of the brain 10,[12][13][14] .…”