Face processing impairments after amygdalotomy

Abstract

We report an investigation of face processing impairments in D.R., a 51-year-old woman with a partial bilateral amygdalotomy. D.R. was able to recognize pre-operatively familiar faces, but she showed generalized problems of name retrieval and a more circumscribed deficit affecting the recognition of faces learnt post-operatively. In contrast to her poor memory for new faces, D.R.'s ability to match simultaneously presented photographs of unfamiliar faces was unimpaired. However, D.R. also experienced deficits in expression processing which compromised the recognition of emotion from people's faces: she was poor both at matching and at identifying photographs of emotional facial expressions. In addition, her interpretation of eye gaze direction was defective, showing a more general problem in reading social signals from the face. The presence of impairments affecting the learning of new faces and the comprehension of gaze direction and facial expressions of emotion is consistent with the hypothesis of a role for the amygdala in learning and social behaviour.

Crossmodal binding of fear in voice and face

“…studies of patients who have undergone amygdalectomies where fear-face deficits are associated with a symmetrical deficit for fear-voice inputs (23,24). However, it should be noted that this claim has been challenged by others (25).…”

The Perception of Facial Emotions - Cues from the Left Amygdaloid Complex

“…An appositely constructed emotional face recognition test, which consists of photographs of 24 faces, representing 6 different emotional states based on the Ekman and Friesen series ( happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise ) [cf. [19]] was administered. Each emotion was represented by 2 faces (1 male/1 female) adding up to a total of 24 photographs.…”

“…Some patients showed significant deficits after bilateral amygdalectomy [19,20] or in the case of the Urbach-Wiethe disease (which produces bilateral amygdala damage) [4,5]. However, 2 patients with encephalitis and bilateral amygdala lesions did not present any impairment in recognizing facial expressions despite an accurate neurocognitive and emotional assessment [21,22].…”

Brain stem afferent connections of the amygdala in the rat with special references to a projection from the parabigeminal nucleus: a fluorescent retrograde tracing study

“…Visual information reaches the amygdala from association areas rather than primary cortex (Herzog and Van Hoesen 1976; Amaral et al 1992;McDonald 1998;Shi and Davis 2001;Sah et al 2003). The observations of Adolphs et al (1994Adolphs et al ( , 1995 and of Young et al (1995) that bilateral Am damage in humans compromises the recognition of fear in facial expressions while leaving intact recognition of face identity, were immediately followed by a considerable body of investigations that confirmed and extended these significant data (Breitner et al 1996;Whalen et al 1998;Morris et al 1999Morris et al , 2001Adolphs and Tranel 2000;Iidaka et al 2001;Shi and Davis 2001;Hariri et al 2002;Oya et al 2002;Amaral 2003;Anderson et al 2003;Williams et al 2004;Das et al 2005;Liddell et al 2005;Tabbert et al 2005;Williams et al 2005;Yoshimura et al 2005). Importantly, the data from healthy volunteers when masking procedures were used, and in patients with extensive lesions of the striate cortex indicate that ''unseen'' fearful and fear-conditioned faces elicit increased Am responses (Whalen et al 1998;Morris et al 1999Morris et al , 2001.…”