Lesions of the human amygdala impair enhanced perception of.pdfVIP

Lesions of the human amygdala impair enhanced perception of emotionally salient events Page 1 of 7 17 May 2001 Nature 411, 305 - 309 (2001); doi:10.1038 Lesions of the human amygdala impair enhanced perception of emotionally salient events ADAM K. ANDERSON*† AND ELIZABETH A. PHELPS‡ * Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA ‡ Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York 10003, USA † Present address: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Jordan Hall, Building 420, Stanford, California 94305-2130, USA Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to A.K.A. (e-mail: adam.k.anderson@). Commensurate with the importance of rapidly and efficiently evaluating motivationally significant stimuli, humans are probably endowed with distinct faculties 1, 2 and maintain specialized neural structures to enhance their detection. Here we consider that a critical function of the human amygdala3, 4 is to enhance the perception of stimuli that have emotional significance. Under conditions of limited attention for normal perceptual awareness—that is, the attentional blink5, 6—we show that healthy observers demonstrate robust benefits for the perception of verbal stimuli of aversive content compared with stimuli of neutral content. In contrast, a patient with bilateral amygdala damage has no enhanced perception for such aversive stimulus events. Examination of patients with either left or right amygdala resections shows that the enhanced perception of aversive words depends specifically on the left amygdala. All patients comprehend normally the affective meaning of the stimulus events, despite the lack of evidence for enhanced perceptual encoding of these events in patients with left amygdala lesions. Our results reveal a neura