An afferent white matter pathway from the pulvinar to the amygdala facilitates fear recognition

McFadyen, Jessica; Mattingley, Jason B.; Garrido, Marta I.

doi:10.1101/277368

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…The bottom-up attention considered in this study is an associated salience acquired through extensive training and may be distinct from bottom-up attention based on physical salience. It may involve a subcortical circuitry that includes superior colliculus, pulvinar, ventral midbrain, and amygdala (McFadyen et al, 2019;Takakuwa et al, 2017). However, physical salience also produced bottom-up attention signals that we observed in the OFC.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 51%

Bottom-up but not Top-down Attention Dominates the Value Representation in the Orbitofrontal Cortex

Zhang

Xie

Yang

2021

Preprint

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The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is essential for value-based learning and decision making. Understanding the attentional modulation of the representation of value in the OFC provides us key information on its functional roles and links the OFC to other cognitive processes. We examined how top-down and bottom-up attention modulates the value encoding in the OFC. Two macaque monkeys were trained to detect a luminance change at a cued location between a pair of visual stimuli, which were over-trained pictures associated with different amount of juice rewards and, thus, different salience. While the monkeys' behavior and the DLPFC neuronal activities indicated that the monkeys actively directed their attention toward the cued location during the task, the OFC neurons' value encoding, however, was dominated by the bottom-up attention based on stimulus salience and only reflected the top-down attention weakly. The disassociation between the top-down and bottom-up attention signals in the OFC indicates that the OFC occupies an early stage of value information processing in the brain.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 51%

Bottom-up but not Top-down Attention Dominates the Value Representation in the Orbitofrontal Cortex

Zhang

Xie

Yang

2021

Preprint

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“…Direct external input into the network was modeled using both the effect of all stimuli (shape 1 fearful 1 sad) into the OFA and overall negative facial expression (fearful 1 sad) into amygdala, or input into these regions separately (Diwadkar et al, 2012;Vai et al, 2016). As in previous studies, the amygdala was included as an input region because of the direct influence of the subcortical visual pathway on this area, which is particularly important in fearful expression processing (Phelps and LeDoux, 2005;McFadyen et al, 2019). The input matrix was not mean centered, and as such, the intrinsic connectivity represents unmodeled implicit baseline (Zeidman et al, 2019).…”

Section: Model Specificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differential Modulation of Effective Connectivity in the Brain’s Extended Face Processing System by Fearful and Sad Facial Expressions

Jamieson

Davey

Harrison

2021

eNeuro

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The processing of emotional facial expressions is underpinned by the integration of information from a distributed network of brain regions. Despite investigations into how different emotional expressions alter the functional relationships within this network, there remains limited research examining which regions drive these interactions. This study investigated effective connectivity during the processing of sad and fearful facial expressions to better understand how these stimuli differentially modulate emotional face processing circuitry. Ninety-eight healthy human adolescents and young adults, aged between 15 and 25 years, underwent an implicit emotional face processing fMRI task. Using dynamic causal modeling (DCM), we examined five brain regions implicated in face processing. These were restricted to the right hemisphere and included the occipital and fusiform face areas, amygdala, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Processing sad and fearful facial expressions were associated with greater positive connectivity from the amygdala to dlPFC. Only the processing of fearful facial expressions was associated with greater negative connectivity from the vmPFC to amygdala. Compared with processing sad faces, processing fearful faces was associated with significantly greater connectivity from the amygdala to dlPFC. No difference was found between the processing of these expressions and the connectivity from the vmPFC to amygdala. Overall, our findings indicate that connectivity from the amygdala and dlPFC appears to be responding to dimensional features which differ between these expressions, likely those relating to arousal. Further research is necessary to examine whether this relationship is also observable for positively valenced emotions.

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“…3 Second, there now exist multiple consortiums around the world that collect high-quality human neuroimaging data from thousands of people, obtaining structural images as well as functional measures from an array of cognitive tasks. 4 In our study, 5 we exploited these two recent advancements and combined them with a long-standing network modelling method (i.e. dynamic causal modelling) 6 to robustly investigate the evidence for a subcortical route to the amygdala in the human brain.…”

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confidence: 99%

Investigating the Subcortical Route to the Amygdala Across Species and in Disordered Fear Responses

McFadyen

2019

J Exp Neurosci

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Over the past few decades, evidence has come to light that there is a rapid subcortical shortcut that transmits visual information to the amygdala, effectively bypassing the visual cortex. This pathway purportedly runs from the superior colliculus to the amygdala via the pulvinar, and thus presents a methodological challenge to study noninvasively in the human brain. Here, we present our recent work where we reliably reconstructed the white matter structure and directional flow of neural signal along this pathway in over 600 healthy young adults. Critically, we found structure-function relationships for the pulvinar-amygdala connection, where people with greater fibre density had stronger functional neural coupling and were also better at recognising fearful facial expressions. These results tie together recent anatomical evidence from other visual primates with very recent optogenetic research on rodents demonstrating a functional role of this pathway in producing fear responses. Here, we discuss how this pathway might operate alongside other thalamo-cortical circuits (such as pulvinar to middle temporal area) and how its structure and function may change according to the sensory input it receives. This newly established circuit might play a potentially important role in autism and/or anxiety disorders.

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An afferent white matter pathway from the pulvinar to the amygdala facilitates fear recognition

Cited by 4 publications

References 53 publications

Bottom-up but not Top-down Attention Dominates the Value Representation in the Orbitofrontal Cortex

Bottom-up but not Top-down Attention Dominates the Value Representation in the Orbitofrontal Cortex

Differential Modulation of Effective Connectivity in the Brain’s Extended Face Processing System by Fearful and Sad Facial Expressions

Investigating the Subcortical Route to the Amygdala Across Species and in Disordered Fear Responses

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