Visual attention modulates brain activation to angry voices

In accordance with influential models proposing prioritized processing of threat, previous studies have shown automatic brain responses to angry prosody in the amygdala and the auditory cortex under auditory distraction conditions. However, it is unknown whether the automatic processing of angry pro...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of neuroscience 2011-06, Vol.31 (26), p.9594-9598
Main Authors: Mothes-Lasch, Martin, Mentzel, Hans-Joachim, Miltner, Wolfgang H R, Straube, Thomas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Stimulation
Adult
Anger - physiology
Attention - physiology
Auditory Perception - physiology
Brain - physiology
Brain Mapping
Brief Communications
Female
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Photic Stimulation
Reaction Time - physiology
Visual Perception - physiology
Voice
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In accordance with influential models proposing prioritized processing of threat, previous studies have shown automatic brain responses to angry prosody in the amygdala and the auditory cortex under auditory distraction conditions. However, it is unknown whether the automatic processing of angry prosody is also observed during cross-modal distraction. The current fMRI study investigated brain responses to angry versus neutral prosodic stimuli during visual distraction. During scanning, participants were exposed to angry or neutral prosodic stimuli while visual symbols were displayed simultaneously. By means of task requirements, participants either attended to the voices or to the visual stimuli. While the auditory task revealed pronounced activation in the auditory cortex and amygdala to angry versus neutral prosody, this effect was absent during the visual task. Thus, our results show a limitation of the automaticity of the activation of the amygdala and auditory cortex to angry prosody. The activation of these areas to threat-related voices depends on modality-specific attention.
ISSN:0270-6474
1529-2401
DOI:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.6665-10.2011