The Human Amygdala: An Evolved System for Relevance Detection

“…fear module is better characterized as a relevance detection system that has a wider role in the processing of emotionally relevant stimuli, then we would predict that any stimuli that are appraised as being relevant for current goals would preferentially activate this system (Sander et al., 2003).”

“Similar amygdala activity is found during incidental processing of vocal emotions when focusing on the occurrence of other auditory events (Sander et al., 2003b, 2007; Sander and Scheich, 2005), or when the emotional cues was not in the spatial focus of attention (Sander et al., 2005).”

“The results of this appraisal often come to one's mind only when they bear special relevance (Sander et al., 2003).”

“…from Murphy et al., 2003; Sergerie et al., 2008; Wager et al., 2003), but rather encodes the emotional salience of highly arousing stimuli (D. Sander et al., 2003), and is, thus, involved in the processing of both unpleasant and pleasant stimuli (but see also e.g. Gerdes et al., 2010).”

“, 2001; Yeung and Cohen, 2006), as well as with current models of amygdala function (Davis and Whalen, 2001; Sander et al., 2003; Schaefer et al., 2006; Ousdal et al., 2008).”

“The amygdala is implicated in a range of behavioral functions that span relevance detection (Sander et al., 2003; Zald, 2003), face perception (Adolphs and Spezio, 2006), autonomic expression of emotion (Davis and Whalen, 2001), and value learning (LeDoux, 2000).”

“information and can be thought of as a “relevance detector” (Sander et al., 2003).”

“…play a key role in evaluating the significance and arousal associated with, and mediating automatic responses to, emotional stimuli (LeDoux, 2000; Sander et al., 2003a; Phelps and LeDoux, 2005), through its rich input and output connections to many subcortical and cortical regions (Amaral et al.,…”

“…in task such as the dot probe may be implemented by the amygdala, which, once it has detected the potential emotional relevance of a stimulus (Sander, Grafman, & Zalla, 2003) will send biasing signals to early cortical visual and/or fronto-parietal regions responsible for orienting and…”

“This is consistent with the current turn in the literature that the amygdala not only responds to social signals of threat, as previously thought, but has a broader role in processing stimulus relevance [Sander et al., 2003].”

“…(1998) has argued that while the amygdala responds to strong emotional stimuli, it also responds to more subtle fear stimuli (pictures of fear faces); therefore, the function of the amygdala may be conceptualized as an affective information processor or relevance detector (Sander et al., 2003).”

“The analogous response displayed by the amygdala, however, might more conclusively be interpreted as mirroring the salience or the arousal of the stimuli (Anderson et al., 2003; Small et al., 2003; Sander et al., 2003), which increases with increasing amount of reward.”

“…a key role for the amygdala in reinforcement learning during the processing of both positive and negative emotions (Sergerie et al., 2008; Sander et al., 2003, for a review), and in particular for learning the positive or negative value of external stimuli through their associationwith…”

“In neuroimaging studies, stimulus relevance has been found to be represented in the amygdala (Sander et al., 2003), and the International Journal of Psychophysiology 74 (2009) 28–33”

“The purported role of the amygdala as a “relevance detector” (Sander et al., 2003) would suggest that its earliest visual input would contain all spatial frequencies and all emotional content, which is in line with the fast subcortical pathway unfiltered for spatial frequency or emotional content demonstrated here.”

“These findings are consistent with models assuming that the amygdala may play a more general role in dynamically modulating the learning process of relevant associations between stimulus and response (see Phelps & LeDoux, 2005; Sander et al., 2003), thereby strengthening or reinforcing some advantageous stimulusrespon…”

“Amygdala function is of high interest for cognitive, social and psychiatric neuroscience, emphasizing the need for reliable assessments in humans (Adolphs, 2010; Sander et al., 2003; Schaefer and Gray, 2007; Schumann et al., 2011).”

“According to these theories (see Scherer, 2001), an event will elicit an emotion only if it is appraised as relevant (see Sander, Grafman, & Zalla, 2003; Sander et al., 2005).”

“…we advanced the hypothesis that the amygdala detects concern relevance, the relevance of a stimulus for a person given the current needs, goals, and the values of the person (see Sander, Grafman, & Zalla, 2003, for further discussion; see also Cunningham & Brosch, 2012; Sander, 2009, in press).”

“relation to embodied cognition and multiple dimensions of appraisal [7, 8, 26, 28,31,37,90].”

“The amygdala as the core of the neural network involved in the appraisal of concern relevance (see Brosch & Sander, 2013; Sander, Grafman, & Zalla, 2003).”

“Theseresultsalsoaccordwith recent proposals that the amygdala might be particularly tuned to the intrinsic salience or biological importance of SOC stimuli (Sander, Grafman, & Zalla, 2003), rather than to threat or other specific emotion categories.”

“According to this framework ‘the specificity and differentiation of emotion mostly relies upon the cognitive evaluation of the meaning and the consequences of a relevant external event within a specific context and relationship to one’s own goals’ (Sander et al., 2003).”

“Because the amygdala is known to be critically implicated in processing threatening and self-relevant affective information (Hsu & Pessoa, 2007; Sander et al., 2003), and has strong projections to autonomic and attentional systems (Pourtois, Schwartz, Seghier, Lazeyras, & Vuilleumier, 2005), these…”

“Findings of this study indicate that rather than responding to threatening or emotional stimuli specifically, the amygdala provides a general signal for behaviourally salient face stimuli, supporting the hypothesis of amoregeneral role of the amygdala in relevancedetection (Sander et al., 2003) ormodulation of attenti…”

“with studies emphasizing the role of the amygdala as a detector of behaviorally relevant stimuli (Sander et al. 2003) and during conditioning procedures with both appetitive and aversive stimuli (Buchel et al.”

“Impact of attention on decoding of emotional prosody Another fundamental issue concerns the ability of humans to rely on emotion to adapt or cope with particularly relevant events or stimuli (Sander et al., 2003, 2005).”

“Indeed, both arousal and vigilance are considered to rely on overlapping brain systems with a central role for the amygdala (Davis and Whalen, 2001), which itself is seen to act as the relevance detector of the brain (Sander et al., 2003).”

“The amygdala may be an early detector of the relevance of stimuli for the individual (Sander et al., 2003).”

“These results are consistent with the vast literature implicating the amygdala in processing social evaluations (Phelps, 2006), emotionally relevant information (Sander et al., 2003) and salient stimuli (Ewbank et al.”

“In recent years, however, the functions associated with the amygdala have been extended well beyond that of threat appraisal (Adolphs, 2010; Morrison and Salzman, 2010) to encompass the amygdala’s central contribution to the appraisal of personal and social salience (Sander et al., 2003; Ewbank et al., 2009; Adolphs,…”

“The left amygdala— being an area well known to reflect stimulus arousal and social relevance (Sander et al., 2003)—was the only region from the AV integration network with significantly stronger responses to congruent happy AV stimuli compared with the incongruent ones even at a liberal uncorrected threshold of p 0.”

“This finding adds to the notion that the amygdala is implicated in the processing of both, positive and negative emotions, and works as a salience detector (Sander et al., 2003).”

“…and Mempel, 1976; Mempel et al., 1979) as well as in fear (LeDoux, 2003)—and social processing, impairment of which is believed to be central to autism (Baron-Cohen et al., 2000; Amaral et al., 2003; Schumann et al., 2006; Santos et al., 2011), and in relevance detection (Sander et al., 2003).”

“the degree of detectedmotivational relevance (Markowitsch& Staniloiu, 2011; Sander et al., 2003).”

“This finding indicates that the amygdala does not respond to the higher rms of music in a similar way as to loud events that may be arousing and behaviorally salient (Sander et al., 2003).”

“It is known from animal research that the amygdala has a general role in attention and vigilance processes beyond its emotional functions (Kapp et al., 1992; Holland and Gallagher, 1999; Davis and Whalen, 2001; Sander et al., 2003; Holland and Gallagher, 2006).”

“The more categorical representation of facial expressions of emotion in the amygdala is consistent with its role in the detection and processing of stimuli pertinent to survival (26, 27).”

“According to Sander et al. (2003), “an event is relevant for an organism if it can significantly influence (positively or negatively) the attainment of his or her goals, or the maintenance of his or her own well-being.””

“…publication) While a number of studies have tended to emphasize a role for the amygdala in coding the perceived arousal of a stimulus, our findings accord more with the Sander et al. (2003) suggestion that the amygdala may contribute to the appraisal of the significance or relevance of an event.”

“(A) Whole-brain linear mixed effect analysis revealed a Group St amygdala region of interest (peak [ 27 3 19]; k 1⁄4 47).”

“In conclusion, our results extend previous findings showing that, in healthy participants, gaze direction can modulate the perception of emotional face expression according to a specific pattern predicted by the appraisal of self-relevance (Sander et al ., 2003, 2005).”

“This hypothesis would be consistent both with the view that the amygdala is involved in conferring salience on a wide range of social and non-social stimuli [106] and with studies that reported differential activation of limbic structures in response to distinct facial emotion types—such as the amygdala for fear [107]…”

“This latter assumption is in line with the research reviewed above demonstrating that the amygdala enhances attention capture and the processing of stimuli that are of high relevance to an individual3s goals or needs (Andersen and Phelps, 2001; Sander et al., 2003; Vuilleumier et al., 2004).”

“Interactions with a variety of cortical and subcortical areas, which together integrate and evaluate the salience of interoceptive and exteroceptive sensory stimuli, modify the response of the amygdala to specific stimuli or contexts.(23) This network assigns salience to stimuli, coordinates adaptive behavioral respon…”

“The amygdala is involved in the detection of salient or relevant information to basic biological drives and psychological needs (Sander et al. 2003).”

“An alternative explanation for the higher propensity of the CM neurons to signal task events is the purported role of the amygdala in allocating attention to relevant stimuli (Kapp et al., 1994; Davis and Whalen 2001; Sander et al., 2003).”

“Based on previous results [16,29] and regarding its evaluation and relevance detection function [30] we tested the hypothesis that all emotional and neutral facial expressions elicit bilateral responses of the amygdala when the task requires the explicit verbal categorization of an emotional facial expression.”

“Instead, the emerging view is that the amygdala plays a more general role in detection and processing of salient information including facial expressions (Whalen, 1998; Davis and Whalen, 2001; Sander et al., 2003; Goossens et al., 2009).”

“latter interpretation is in accordance with recent data suggesting that amygdala is occupied with relevance detection in general, rather than with only fear-related or reward-related information [30,31].”

“Consequently, the specificity of the amygdala for the processing of unpleasant stimuli is questioned, and it has been suggested that the amygdala is not an exclusive fear module, but tags the emotional salience of high arousing stimuli (Sander et al., 2003).”

“The perception and evaluation of emotional stimuli involves the activity of neural structures, especially the amygdala (Vuilleumier, 2005; Sander, Grafman, & Zalla, 2003), which are not involved in the cueing of attention toward merely perceptively salient stimuli (Desimone & Duncan, 1995).”

“The amygdala is a key structure of the emotional brain and has been regarded a socio-emotional relevance detector [6].”

“One interpretation of these data is that this initial amygdala response reflects deployment of attentional resources toward a CS with uncertain predictive value (Whalen, 1998; Sander et al., 2003).”

“a deficit in the processing of fear only [93].”

“may receive input from the AM which has been conceptualized as an evolved significance detector constantly scrutinizing the environment for biologically relevant cues (Sander et al. 2003).”

“However, the amygdala is not only restricted to signaling of fear, but is also involved in the evaluation of salient (Sander et al., 2003) and novel stimuli (Blackford et al.”