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

Minxha, Juri; Mosher, Clayton P.; Morrow, Jeremiah K; Mamelak, Adam N.; Adolphs, Ralph; Gothard, Katalin M.; Rutishauser, Ueli

doi:10.1016/j.celrep.2016.12.083

Cited by 68 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 55 publications

(94 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…These data show that face-selective activity in both the human and monkey amygdala is gated by fixations, the behavioral instantiations of visual attention. (Reprinted with permission from Ref 29. Copyright 2017 Cell Press 2017)…”

Section: Figurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…To determine whether eye movements during scanning of more complex visual scenes modulate the activity of face cells, we recorded neuronal responses in the human and monkey amygdala during the presentation of arrays of images that contained both faces and nonface objects ( Figure 1). 29 A typical array contained two human faces, two monkey faces, and four objects such as cars, fruits, flowers, and fractals. The images were arranged in a circular array surrounding a central fixation point.…”

Section: Imbedding Face Stimuli In Visual Scenes Revealed the Role Ofmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…29 A typical array contained two human faces, two monkey faces, and four objects such as cars, fruits, flowers, and fractals. The images were arranged in a circular array surrounding a central fixation point.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

New perspectives on the neurophysiology of primate amygdala emerging from the study of naturalistic social behaviors

Gothard

Mosher

Zimmerman

et al. 2017

WIRES Cognitive Science

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A major challenge of primate neurophysiology, particularly in the domain of social neuroscience, is to adopt more natural behaviors without compromising the ability to relate patterns of neural activity to specific actions or sensory inputs. Traditional approaches have identified neural activity patterns in the amygdala in response to simplified versions of social stimuli such as static images of faces. As a departure from this reduced approach, single images of faces were replaced with arrays of images or videos of conspecifics. These stimuli elicited more natural behaviors and new types of neural responses: (1) attention-gated responses to faces, (2) selective responses to eye contact, and (3) selective responses to touch and somatosensory feedback during the production of facial expressions. An additional advance toward more natural social behaviors in the laboratory was the implementation of dyadic social interactions. Under these conditions, neurons encoded similarly rewards that monkeys delivered to self and to their social partner. These findings reinforce the value of bringing natural, ethologically valid, behavioral tasks under neurophysiological scrutiny.

show abstract

Section: Figurementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Imbedding Face Stimuli In Visual Scenes Revealed the Role Ofmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

New perspectives on the neurophysiology of primate amygdala emerging from the study of naturalistic social behaviors

Gothard

Mosher

Zimmerman

et al. 2017

WIRES Cognitive Science

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Several studies have showed that neurons in basolateral amygdala respond to faces and to facial expressions of emotions (Adolphs et al, 1994; Fried et al, 1997; Gothard et al, 2007; Liu et al, 2016; Minxha et al, 2017) The basolateral amygdala has been shown also to be responsive to tasks were social judgments and valence of stimulus (social or not social) have to be made (Chang et al, 2015). It is interesting to note that neuroanatomical studies also found that this region of the amygdala is connected with the orbitofrontal cortex (areas 12 and 13; Carmichael and Price, 1995), which also receives projections from the F5/opercular sector.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Two different mirror neuron networks: The sensorimotor (hand) and limbic (face) pathways

et al. 2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The vast majority of functional studies investigating mirror neurons (MNs) explored their properties in relation to hand actions, and very few investigated how MNs responding to mouth actions or communicative gestures. From an anatomical point of view, hand and mouth MNs were recorded in two partially overlapping sectors of the ventral precentral cortex of the macaque monkey: hand MNs were located more dorsally (area F5), mouth MNs more ventrally, extending over the border between the premotor (F5) and the opercular region (DO and PrCO). Despite this anatomical segregation, there is a general assumption that a same neuroanatomical network, having a main source of visual information deriving from the parietal cortex, supports both hand and mouth MNs. In the current review, we challenge this perspective and describe the connectivity pattern of mouth MNs sector, comparing it with the hand MNs sector of F5. The mouth and hand MNs sectors share part of their connectivity pattern, but each also has distinct and specific connections. In particular, the mouth MNs F5/opercular region is connected with premotor, parietal areas mostly related to the somatosensory and motor representation of the face/mouth (area F4, the region between areas F3 and F6, areas PF and SII) and with area PrCO, involved in processing gustatory and somatosensory intraoral input. Unlike hand MNs, mouth MNs do not receive their visual input from parietal regions. Information related to face/communicative behaviors could come from the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (areas 12 and 46). Further strong connections derive from limbic structures involved in encoding emotional facial expressions and motivational/reward processing. These brain structures include the anterior cingulate cortex, the anterior and mid-dorsal insula, orbitofrontal cortex and the basolateral amygdala. These anatomical data are in agreement with neurophysiological evidence showing that in the mouth MNs F5/opercular region there are neurons responding to facial communicative gestures and also neurons firing during the production of vocalizations. The mirror mechanism is therefore composed and supported by at least two different anatomical pathways: one is concerned with sensorimotor transformation in relation to reaching and hand grasping within the traditional parietal-premotor circuits; the second one is linked to the mouth/face motor control and is connected with limbic structures, involved in communication/emotions and reward processing. This new view of the mirror mechanism provides a new theoretical account to explain different patterns of brain activation in neuroimaging studies and has also important implications for our comprehension of the developmental factors and evolutionary processes involved in mirror neurons origins and functions.

show abstract

“…The ACC is a key component of the limbic system, highly connected with other prefrontal areas, motor regions, as well as down-stream brainstem nuclei (Bush et al 2000;Watanabe 2017). Midline motor areas in preSMA and ACC are implicated in the generation of non-voluntary facial expressions (Morecraft et al 2004;Müri 2016;Vrticka et al 2013) and constitute a direct output pathway mediating automatic mimicry to emotional faces and mirror neuron networks with communicative/social functions (Ferrari et al 2013;Gothard 2014;Minxha et al 2017). These regions may also contribute to subjective affect, as shown by electrical stimulation during surgery (Caruana et al 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Brain networks processing temporal information in dynamic facial expressions

Skiba

Vuilleumier

2019

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Acknowledgments:We would like to thank Lucas Tamarit for his help with the FACSGen program. Finally, we are grateful to Prof. Karl Friston for his guidance in the DCM analysis. 2 AbstractPerception of emotional expressions in faces relies on the integration of distinct facial features. We used fMRI to examine the role of local and global motion information in facial movements during exposure to novel dynamic face stimuli. We found that synchronous expressions distinctively engaged medial prefrontal areas in the ventral anterior cingulate cortex (vACC), supplementary premotor areas, and bilateral superior frontal gyrus (global temporal-spatial processing). Asynchronous expressions in which one part of the face (e.g., eyes) unfolded before the other (e.g., mouth) activated more the right superior temporal sulcus (STS) and inferior frontal gyrus (local temporal-spatial processing). DCM analysis further showed that processing of asynchronous expression features was associated with a differential information flow, centered on STS, which received direct input from occipital cortex and projected to the amygdala. Moreover, STS and amygdala displayed selective interactions with vACC where the integration of both local and global motion cues (present in synchronous expressions) could take place. These results provide new evidence for a role of both local and global temporal dynamics in emotional expressions, extracted in partly separate brain pathways. Importantly, we show that dynamic expressions with synchronous movement cues may distinctively engage brain areas responsible for motor execution of expressions.

show abstract

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

Cited by 68 publications

References 55 publications

New perspectives on the neurophysiology of primate amygdala emerging from the study of naturalistic social behaviors

New perspectives on the neurophysiology of primate amygdala emerging from the study of naturalistic social behaviors

Two different mirror neuron networks: The sensorimotor (hand) and limbic (face) pathways

Brain networks processing temporal information in dynamic facial expressions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About