Content area
Full Text
Exp Brain Res (2011) 209:153158 DOI 10.1007/s00221-010-2508-8
RESEARCH NOTE
Emotion and action: the eVect of fear on saccadic performance
Greg L. West Naseem Al-Aidroos Josh Susskind Jay Pratt
Received: 3 May 2010 / Accepted: 22 November 2010 / Published online: 14 December 2010 Springer-Verlag 2010
Abstract According to evolutionary accounts, emotions originated to prepare an organism for action (Darwin 1872; Frijda 1986). To investigate this putative relationship between emotion and action, we examined the eVect of an emotional stimulus on oculomotor actions controlled by the superior colliculus (SC), which has connections with sub-cortical structures involved in the perceptual prioritization of emotion, such as the amygdala through the pulvinar. The pulvinar connects the amygdala to cells in the SC responsible for the speed of saccade execution, while not aVecting the spatial component of the saccade. We tested the eVect of emotion on both temporal and spatial signatures of oculomotor functioning using a gap-distractor paradigm. Changes in spatial programming were examined through saccadic curvature in response to a remote distractor stimulus, while changes in temporal execution were examined using a Wxation gap manipulation. We show that following the presentation of a task-irrelevant fearful face, the temporal but not the spatial component of the saccade generation system was aVected.
Keywords Saccades Superior colliculus
Emotion Action
Introduction
There is now considerable evidence that emotive processing has widespread eVects on human perceptual and attentional functioning. For example, visual search tasks have
revealed that searches for emotional stimuli are more eYcient than those for neutral stimuli (e.g., Eastwood et al. 2003; hman et al. 2001), and manual response times to targets following emotional content are faster compared to those following neutral content (Fox et al. 2002; 2001). In addition, perceptual detection thresholds for emotional content have been found to be lower than non-emotional stimuli (Calvo and Esteves 2005), and the perception of emotional content has been shown to be accelerated in time compared to competing neutral information (West et al. 2009). This prioritized perception of emotional stimuli is thought to occur through a fast-acting subcortical pathway originating from magnocellular retinal inputs which include reciprocal connections between the superior colliculus (SC), pulvinar, and amygdala (Ledoux 2000; Linke et al. 1998; Amaral et al. 1992). Indeed, disrupting the magno-cellular pathway suppresses this...