Dataset Information

Search for a threatening target triggers limbic guidance of spatial attention.

ABSTRACT: The ability to actively locate potential threats in our environment is highly adaptive. To investigate mediating neural mechanisms, we designed a visual search task in which central cues signaled future location and emotional expression (angry or neutral) of a target face. Cues predicting angry targets accelerated subsequent attention shifts, indicating that endogenous signals predicting threatening events can prime the spatial attention network. Functional imaging showed that spatially informative cues activated the fusiform gyrus (FG) as well as frontoparietal components of the spatial attention network, including intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and frontal eye field (FEF), whereas cues predicting angry faces also activated limbic areas, including the amygdala. Anatomically overlapping, additive effects of spatial and emotional cuing were identified in the IPS, FEFs, and FG, regions that also displayed augmented connectivity with the amygdala after cues predicting angry faces. These data highlight a key role for the frontoparietal spatial attention network in the compilation of a salience map that combines the spatial coordinates of an event with its motivational relevance. Furthermore, they suggest that active search for a threatening stimulus elicits amygdala input to the spatial attention network and inferotemporal visual areas, facilitating the rapid detection of upcoming motivationally significant events.

SUBMITTER: Mohanty A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4348011 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Search for a threatening target triggers limbic guidance of spatial attention.

Mohanty Aprajita A Egner Tobias T Monti Jim M JM Mesulam M-Marsel MM

The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 20090801 34

The ability to actively locate potential threats in our environment is highly adaptive. To investigate mediating neural mechanisms, we designed a visual search task in which central cues signaled future location and emotional expression (angry or neutral) of a target face. Cues predicting angry targets accelerated subsequent attention shifts, indicating that endogenous signals predicting threatening events can prime the spatial attention network. Functional imaging showed that spatially informat ...[more]

PMID: 19710309

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Project description:Cross-modal spatial cueing can affect performance in a visual search task. For example, search performance improves if a visual target and an auditory cue originate from the same spatial location, and it deteriorates if they originate from different locations. Moreover, it has recently been postulated that multisensory settings, i.e., experimental settings, in which critical stimuli are concurrently presented in different sensory modalities (e.g., visual and auditory), may trigger asymmetries in visuospatial attention. Thereby, a facilitation has been observed for visual stimuli presented in the right compared to the left visual space. However, it remains unclear whether auditory cueing of attention differentially affects search performance in the left and the right hemifields in audio-visual search tasks. The present study investigated whether spatial asymmetries would occur in a search task with cross-modal spatial cueing. Participants completed a visual search task that contained no auditory cues (i.e., unimodal visual condition), spatially congruent, spatially incongruent, and spatially non-informative auditory cues. To further assess participants' accuracy in localising the auditory cues, a unimodal auditory spatial localisation task was also administered. The results demonstrated no left/right asymmetries in the unimodal visual search condition. Both an additional incongruent, as well as a spatially non-informative, auditory cue resulted in lateral asymmetries. Thereby, search times were increased for targets presented in the left compared to the right hemifield. No such spatial asymmetry was observed in the congruent condition. However, participants' performance in the congruent condition was modulated by their tone localisation accuracy. The findings of the present study demonstrate that spatial asymmetries in multisensory processing depend on the validity of the cross-modal cues, and occur under specific attentional conditions, i.e., when visual attention has to be reoriented towards the left hemifield.

Dataset Information

Search for a threatening target triggers limbic guidance of spatial attention.

Publications

Search for a threatening target triggers limbic guidance of spatial attention.

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