It is debated whether the amygdala is critical for the emotional modulation of attention. While some studies show reduced attentional benefits for emotional stimuli in amygdala-damaged patients, others report preserved emotional effects. Various factors may account for these discrepant findings, including the temporal onset of the lesion, the completeness and severity of tissue damage, or the extent of neural plasticity and compensatory mechanisms, among others. Here, we investigated a rare patient with focal acute destruction of bilateral amygdala and adjacent hippocampal structures after late-onset herpetic encephalitis in adulthood. We compared her performance in two classic visual attention paradigms with that of healthy controls. First, we tested for any emotional advantage during an attentional blink task. Whereas controls showed better report of fearful and happy than neutral faces on trials with short lags between targets, the patient showed no emotional advantage, but also globally reduced report rates for all faces. Second, to ensure that memory disturbance due to hippocampal damage would not interfere with report performance, we also used a visual search task with either emotionally or visually salient face targets. Although the patient still exhibited efficient guided search for visually salient, non-emotional faces, her search slopes for emotional versus neutral faces showed no comparable benefit. In both tasks, however, changes in the patient predominated for happy more than fear stimuli, despite her normal explicit recognition of happy expressions. Our results provide new support for a causal role of the amygdala in emotional facilitation of visual attention, especially under conditions of increasing task-demands, and not limited to negative information. In addition, our data suggest that such deficits may not be amenable to plasticity and compensation, perhaps due to sudden and late-onset damage occurring in adulthood.

中文翻译：

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双侧杏仁核病变后视觉注意力中的情绪偏见受损。

杏仁核是否对注意力的情绪调节至关重要，这是有争议的。尽管一些研究表明杏仁核受损患者对情绪刺激的注意力降低，但另一些研究则保留了情绪影响。各种因素可能导致这些差异性发现，包括病变的暂时发作，组织损伤的完整性和严重性，神经可塑性和补偿机制的程度等。在这里，我们调查了成年晚期迟发性疱疹性脑炎后双侧杏仁核和邻近海马结构发生局灶性急性破坏的罕见患者。我们将她在两种经典的视觉注意范例中的表现与健康对照者的表现进行了比较。首先，我们测试了注意眨眼任务期间的情绪优势。在目标之间存在短暂滞后的试验中，对照组显示出比中性面孔更好的关于恐惧和快乐的报告，而患者没有情感优势，但总体上降低了所有面孔的报告率。其次，为了确保不会因海马受损而引起的记忆障碍不会干扰报告的表现，我们还使用了具有情感或视觉显着脸部目标的视觉搜索任务。尽管患者仍对视觉显着，非情绪化的面部表现出有效的指导搜索，但她的情感性面孔与中性面孔的搜索斜率却没有可比的益处。然而，在这两项任务中，尽管患者对正常表情的理解是正常的，但对患者而言，改变的主要因素还是快乐而不是恐惧刺激。我们的结果为杏仁核在视觉注意的情感促进中的因果作用提供了新的支持，尤其是在任务需求增加的情况下，并且不仅限于负面信息。另外，我们的数据表明，这种缺陷可能不适合可塑性和补偿，这可能是由于成年后突然和迟发性损害所致。