杏仁核对感觉刺激的情绪性加工:自动化过程和注意调控过程的整合

利用有限的认知资源应对多变的环境刺激,选择性注意和情绪加工一个重要的共同机制是优先化关键信息的加工。尽管情绪性刺激(特别是威胁刺激)能够影响注意资源的分配,但一些关键脑区(如杏仁核)的对情绪性刺激的加工是自动化过程还是受到注意调节一直是个有争议的问题。最新的结合高时间分辨率和高空间分辨率的神经生理记录研究表明,情绪加工的重要核团,杏仁核,对情绪性刺激的加工包含早期快速的不依赖于注意资源和认知加工负荷的自动化加工成分和晚期受到额-顶叶皮层自上而下的注意调控成分,这种功能整合证实杏仁核情绪性加工存在并行的皮层下和皮层通路。

Emotional Processing in the Amygdala: Integration of Automatic Process and Attentional Modulation

Given the flooding environmental information entering the cognitive system, together with its processing capacity limitations, a critical function shared by both attentional and emotional processes is to prioritize the processing of pertinent events. Although it is generally accepted that emotional stimuli can capture and affect the allocation of attentional resource, whether the processing of emotional stimuli is automatic without attention and awareness or depends on available attentional resources and receives top-down modulation is a long-term debate. Recent neurophysiological recordings with high spatio-temporal resolution reconciled this controversy by demonstrating that responses to emotional stimuli in the amygdala, a critical sub-cortical structure in emotional processing, contained both an early and rapid automatic component which was not affected by attentional and cognitive load and a later component that received top-down attentional modulation from fronto-parietal cortices. This functional integration in the amygdala supports the dual-pathway model of emotional processing.