Journal
COGNITIVE BRAIN RESEARCH
Volume 20, Issue 1, Pages 67-80Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
DOI: 10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2004.01.006
Keywords
emotion; attention; anterior cingulate gyrus; functional MRI; target detection; novelty
Funding
- NIDA NIH HHS [R01 DA14094] Funding Source: Medline
- NIMH NIH HHS [P50 MH60451] Funding Source: Medline
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Emotional and attentional functions are known to be distributed along ventral and dorsal networks in the brain, respectively. However, the interactions between these systems remain to be specified. The present study used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how attentional focus can modulate the neural activity elicited by scenes that vary in emotional content. In a visual oddball task, aversive and neutral scenes were presented intermittently among circles and squares. The squares were frequent standard events, whereas the other novel stimulus categories occurred rarely. One experimental group [N = 10] was instructed to count the circles, whereas another group [N= 12] counted the emotional scenes. A main effect of emotion was found in the amygdala (AMG) and ventral frontotemporal cortices. In these regions, activation was significantly greater for emotional than neutral stimuli but was invariant to attentional focus. A main effect of attentional focus was found in dorsal frontoparietal cortices, whose activity signaled task-relevant target events irrespective of emotional content. The only brain region that was sensitive to both emotion and attentional focus was the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACG). When circles were task-relevant, the ACG responded equally to circle targets and distracting emotional scenes. The ACG response to emotional scenes increased when they were task-relevant, and the response to circles concomitantly decreased. These findings support and extend prominent network theories of emotion-attention interactions that highlight the integrative role played by the anterior cingulate. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available