Emotional attention in acquired prosopagnosia
Open Access
- 28 April 2009
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
- Vol. 4 (3), 268-277
- https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsp014
Abstract
The present study investigated whether emotionally expressive faces guide attention and modulate fMRI activity in fusiform gyrus in acquired prosopagnosia. Patient PS, a pure case of acquired prosopagnosia with intact right middle fusiform gyrus, performed two behavioral experiments and a functional imaging experiment to address these questions. In a visual search task involving face stimuli, PS was faster to select the target face when it was expressing fear or happiness as compared to when it was emotionally neutral. In a change detection task, PS detected significantly more changes when the changed face was fearful as compared to when it was neutral. Finally, an fMRI experiment showed enhanced activation to emotionally expressive faces and bodies in right fusiform gyrus. In addition, PS showed normal body-selective activation in right fusiform gyrus, partially overlapping the fusiform face area. Together these behavioral and neuroimaging results show that attention was preferentially allocated to emotional faces in patient PS, as observed in healthy subjects. We conclude that systems involved in the emotional guidance of attention by facial expression can function normally in acquired prosopagnosia, and can thus be dissociated from systems involved in face identification.Keywords
This publication has 51 references indexed in Scilit:
- Effects of emotional and non-emotional cues on visual search in neglect patients: Evidence for distinct sources of attentional guidanceNeuropsychologia, 2008
- Neural Correlates of Perceiving Emotional Faces and Bodies in Developmental Prosopagnosia: An Event-Related fMRI-StudyPLOS ONE, 2008
- Emotional modulation of body-selective visual areasSocial Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2007
- The neural basis of visual body perceptionNature Reviews Neuroscience, 2007
- Emotion Facilitates Perception and Potentiates the Perceptual Benefits of AttentionPsychological Science, 2006
- Dependence of amygdala activation on echo time: Results from olfactory fMRI experimentsNeuroImage, 2006
- Does Prosopagnosia Take the Eyes Out of Face Representations? Evidence for a Defect in Representing Diagnostic Facial Information following Brain DamageJournal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2005
- Electrophysiological Correlates of Rapid Spatial Orienting Towards Fearful FacesCerebral Cortex, 2004
- A Cortical Area Selective for Visual Processing of the Human BodyScience, 2001
- Effects of Attention and Emotion on Face Processing in the Human Brain: An Event-Related fMRI StudyNeuron, 2001