Subcortical amygdala pathways enable rapid face processing.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Garvert MM
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4229499 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Recent evidence suggests that a rapid, automatic face detection system is supported by subcortical structures including the amygdala, pulvinar, and superior colliculus. Early-emerging abnormalities in these structures may be related to reduced social orienting in children with autism, and subsequently, to aberrant development of cortical circuits involved in face processing. Our objective was to determine whether functional abnormalities in the subcortical face processing system are present in adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) during supraliminal fearful face processing. Participants included twenty-eight individuals with ASD and 25 controls group-matched on age, IQ, and behavioral performance. The ASD group met diagnostic criteria on the ADI-R, ADOS-G, and DSM-IV. Both the ASD and control groups showed significant activation in bilateral fusiform gyri. The control group exhibited additional significant responses in the right amygdala, right pulvinar, and bilateral superior colliculi. In the direct group comparison, the controls showed significantly greater activation in the left amygdala, bilateral fusiform gyrus, right pulvinar, and bilateral superior colliculi. No brain region showed significantly greater activation in the ASD group compared to the controls. Thus, basic rapid face identification mechanisms appear to be functional in ASD. However, individuals with ASD failed to engage the subcortical brain regions involved in face detection and automatic emotional face processing, suggesting a core mechanism for impaired socioemotional processing in ASD. Neural abnormalities in this system may contribute to early-emerging deficits in social orienting and attention, the putative precursors to abnormalities in social cognition and cortical face processing specialization.
| S-EPMC3426450 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundExposure to combat can have a significant impact across a wide array of domains, and may manifest as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a debilitating mental illness that is associated with neural and affective sequelae. This study tested the hypothesis that combat-exposed individuals with and without PTSD, relative to healthy control subjects with no history of PTSD or combat exposure, would show amygdala hyperactivity during performance of a well-validated face processing task. We further hypothesized that differences in the prefrontal cortex would best differentiate the combat-exposed groups with and without PTSD.MethodsTwelve men with PTSD related to combat in Operations Enduring Freedom and/or Iraqi Freedom, 12 male combat-exposed control patients with a history of Operations Enduring Freedom and/or Iraqi Freedom combat exposure but no history of PTSD, and 12 healthy control male patients with no history of combat exposure or PTSD completed a face-matching task during functional magnetic resonance imaging.ResultsThe PTSD group showed greater amygdala activation to fearful versus happy faces than both the combat-exposed control and healthy control groups. Both the PTSD and the combat-exposed control groups showed greater amygdala activation to all faces versus shapes relative to the healthy control group. However, the combat-exposed control group relative to the PTSD group showed greater prefrontal/parietal connectivity with the amygdala, while the PTSD group showed greater connectivity with the subgenual cingulate. The strength of connectivity in the PTSD group was inversely related to avoidance scores.ConclusionsThese observations are consistent with the hypothesis that PTSD is associated with a deficiency in top-down modulation of amygdala activation by the prefrontal cortex and shows specific sensitivity to fearful faces.
| S-EPMC3384263 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The amygdala has been regarded as a key substrate for emotion processing. However, the engagement of the left and right amygdala during the early perceptual processing of different emotional faces remains unclear. We investigated the temporal profiles of oscillatory gamma activity in the amygdala and effective connectivity of the amygdala with the thalamus and cortical areas during implicit emotion-perceptual tasks using event-related magnetoencephalography (MEG). We found that within 100 ms after stimulus onset the right amygdala habituated to emotional faces rapidly (with duration around 20-30 ms), whereas activity in the left amygdala (with duration around 50-60 ms) sustained longer than that in the right. Our data suggest that the right amygdala could be linked to autonomic arousal generated by facial emotions and the left amygdala might be involved in decoding or evaluating expressive faces in the early perceptual emotion processing. The results of effective connectivity provide evidence that only negative emotional processing engages both cortical and subcortical pathways connected to the right amygdala, representing its evolutional significance (survival). These findings demonstrate the asymmetric engagement of bilateral amygdala in emotional face processing as well as the capability of MEG for assessing thalamo-cortico-limbic circuitry.
| S-EPMC4309641 | biostudies-literature
Project description:OBJECTIVE:Suicide is the second leading cause of death among adolescents; however, objective biomarkers of suicide risk are lacking. Aberrant self-face amygdala activity is associated with suicide ideation, and its connectivity with neural regions that enable self-processing (eg medial prefrontal cortex) may be a suicide risk factor. METHOD:Adolescents (aged 11-17 years; N = 120) were sorted into four groups: healthy controls (HC), depressed individuals with low suicide ideation (LS), depressed individuals with high suicide ideation (HS), and depressed suicide attempters (SA). Youth completed an emotional (Happy, Sad, Neutral) self-face recognition task in the scanner. Bilateral amygdala task-dependent functional connectivity was determined with psychophysiological interaction analysis. Connectivity was compared across groups and within Self versus Other faces across emotions and hemispheres. Voxelwise results were thresholded (p < .005, uncorrected) and corrected for multiple comparisons (p < .05, familywise error). RESULTS:Both HS and SA displayed greater amygdala connectivity with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and precuneus, compared to LS, who, in turn, showed greater connectivity than HC. Greater left amygdala-rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) connectivity was observed in SA compared to all other groups, whereas right amygdala-rACC connectivity was greater in HS versus LS and HC. CONCLUSION:Greater connectivity between amygdala and other regions implicated in self-face processing differentiated suicide ideation and suicide attempt groups. A dose-dependent response showed that greater rACC-left amygdala connectivity during self-face processing was associated with a recent suicide attempt, but that a greater rACC-right amygdala connectivity was associated with suicide ideation.
| S-EPMC6492541 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The human brain is specialized for face processing, yet we sometimes perceive illusory faces in objects. It is unknown whether these natural errors of face detection originate from a rapid process based on visual features or from a slower, cognitive re-interpretation. Here we use a multifaceted approach to understand both the spatial distribution and temporal dynamics of illusory face representation in the brain by combining functional magnetic resonance imaging and magnetoencephalography neuroimaging data with model-based analysis. We find that the representation of illusory faces is confined to occipital-temporal face-selective visual cortex. The temporal dynamics reveal a striking evolution in how illusory faces are represented relative to human faces and matched objects. Illusory faces are initially represented more similarly to real faces than matched objects are, but within ~250 ms, the representation transforms, and they become equivalent to ordinary objects. This is consistent with the initial recruitment of a broadly-tuned face detection mechanism which privileges sensitivity over selectivity.
| S-EPMC7481186 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The ability to process and respond to emotional facial expressions is a critical skill for healthy social and emotional development. There has been growing interest in understanding the neural circuitry underlying development of emotional processing, with previous research implicating functional connectivity between amygdala and frontal regions. However, existing work has focused on threatening emotional faces, raising questions regarding the extent to which these developmental patterns are specific to threat or to emotional face processing more broadly. In the current study, we examined age-related changes in brain activity and amygdala functional connectivity during an fMRI emotional face matching task (including angry, fearful, and happy faces) in 61 healthy subjects aged 7-25 years. We found age-related decreases in ventral medial prefrontal cortex activity in response to happy faces but not to angry or fearful faces, and an age-related change (shifting from positive to negative correlation) in amygdala-anterior cingulate cortex/medial prefrontal cortex (ACC/mPFC) functional connectivity to all emotional faces. Specifically, positive correlations between amygdala and ACC/mPFC in children changed to negative correlations in adults, which may suggest early emergence of bottom-up amygdala excitatory signaling to ACC/mPFC in children and later development of top-down inhibitory control of ACC/mPFC over amygdala in adults. Age-related changes in amygdala-ACC/mPFC connectivity did not vary for processing of different facial emotions, suggesting changes in amygdala-ACC/mPFC connectivity may underlie development of broad emotional processing, rather than threat-specific processing. Hum Brain Mapp 37:1684-1695, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
| S-EPMC4837047 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Depressive and anxiety disorders are often first diagnosed during adolescence and it is known that they persist into adulthood. Previous studies often tried to dissociate depressive and anxiety disorders, but high comorbidity makes this difficult and maybe even impossible. The goal of this study was to use neuroimaging to test what the unique contribution is of depression and anxiety symptomatology on emotional processing and amygdala activation, and to compare the results with a healthy control group. We included 25 adolescents with depressive and/or anxiety disorders and 26 healthy adolescents. Participants performed an emotional face processing task while in the MRI scanner. We were particularly interested in the relation between depression/anxiety symptomatology and patterns of amygdala activation. There were no significant differences in activation patterns between the control group and the clinical group on whole brain level and ROI level. However, we found that dimensional scores on an anxiety but not a depression subscale significantly predicted brain activation in the right amygdala when processing fearful, happy and neutral faces. These results suggest that anxiety symptoms are a better predictor for differentiating activation patterns in the amygdala than depression symptoms. Although the current study includes a relatively large sample of treatment naïve adolescents with depression/anxiety disorders, results might be influenced by differences between studies in recruitment strategies or methodology. Future research should include larger samples with a more equal distribution of adolescents with a clinical diagnosis of depression and/or anxiety. To conclude, this study shows that abnormal amygdala responses to emotional faces in depression and anxiety seems to be more dependent on anxiety symptoms than on depression symptoms, and thereby highlights the need for more research to better characterize clinical groups in future studies.
| S-EPMC4046490 | biostudies-literature
Project description:IntroductionConsiderable research has established a link between socioeconomic status (SES) and brain function. While studies have shown a link between poverty status and amygdala response to negative stimuli, a paucity of knowledge exists on whether neighborhood poverty is also independently associated with amygdala hyperactive response to negative stimuli.PurposeUsing functional brain imaging data, this study tested the association between neighborhood SES and the amygdala's response to negative stimuli. Considering race as a sociological rather than a biological construct, we also explored racial heterogeneity in this association between non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic White youth.MethodsWe borrowed the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. The sample was 2,490 nine to ten year old non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic White adolescents. The independent variable was neighborhood income which was treated as a continuous measure. The primary outcomes were the right and left amygdala response to negative face during an N-Back task. Age, sex, race, marital status, and family SES were the covariates. To analyze the data, we used linear regression models.ResultsLow neighborhood income was independently associated with a higher level of amygdala response to negative face. Similar results were seen for the right and left amygdala. These effects were significant net of race, age, sex, marital status, and family SES. An association between low neighborhood SES and higher left but not right amygdala response to negative face could be observed for non-Hispanic Black youth. No association between neighborhood SES and left or right amygdala response to negative face could be observed for non-Hispanic White youth.ConclusionsFor American youth, particularly non-Hispanic Black youth, living in a poor neighborhood predicts the left amygdala reaction to negative face. This result suggested that Black youth who live in poor neighborhoods are at a high risk of poor emotion regulation. This finding has implications for policy making to reduce inequalities in undesired behavioral and emotional outcomes. Policy solutions to health inequalities should address inequalities in neighborhood SES.
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Project description:Previous work found a small but significant relationship between holistic processing measured with the composite task and face recognition ability measured by the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT; Duchaine & Nakayama, 2006). Surprisingly, recent work using a different measure of holistic processing (Vanderbilt Holistic Face Processing Test [VHPT-F]; Richler, Floyd, & Gauthier, 2014) and a larger sample found no evidence for such a relationship. In Experiment 1 we replicate this unexpected result, finding no relationship between holistic processing (VHPT-F) and face recognition ability (CFMT). A key difference between the VHPT-F and other holistic processing measures is that unique face parts are used on each trial in the VHPT-F, unlike in other tasks where a small set of face parts repeat across the experiment. In Experiment 2, we test the hypothesis that correlations between the CFMT and holistic processing tasks are driven by stimulus repetition that allows for learning during the composite task. Consistent with our predictions, CFMT performance was correlated with holistic processing in the composite task when a small set of face parts repeated over trials, but not when face parts did not repeat. A meta-analysis confirms that relationships between the CFMT and holistic processing depend on stimulus repetition. These results raise important questions about what is being measured by the CFMT, and challenge current assumptions about why faces are processed holistically.
| S-EPMC4581616 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Prosopagnosia has largely been regarded as an untreatable disorder. However, recent case studies using cognitive training have shown that it is possible to enhance face recognition abilities in individuals with developmental prosopagnosia. Our goal was to determine if this approach could be effective in a larger population of developmental prosopagnosics. We trained 24 developmental prosopagnosics using a 3-week online face-training program targeting holistic face processing. Twelve subjects with developmental prosopagnosia were assessed before and after training, and the other 12 were assessed before and after a waiting period, they then performed the training, and were then assessed again. The assessments included measures of front-view face discrimination, face discrimination with view-point changes, measures of holistic face processing, and a 5-day diary to quantify potential real-world improvements. Compared with the waiting period, developmental prosopagnosics showed moderate but significant overall training-related improvements on measures of front-view face discrimination. Those who reached the more difficult levels of training ('better' trainees) showed the strongest improvements in front-view face discrimination and showed significantly increased holistic face processing to the point of being similar to that of unimpaired control subjects. Despite challenges in characterizing developmental prosopagnosics' everyday face recognition and potential biases in self-report, results also showed modest but consistent self-reported diary improvements. In summary, we demonstrate that by using cognitive training that targets holistic processing, it is possible to enhance face perception across a group of developmental prosopagnosics and further suggest that those who improved the most on the training task received the greatest benefits.
| S-EPMC4032098 | biostudies-literature