The Human Amygdala: An Evolved System for Relevance Detection

“Moreover, the amygdala has been construed as a relevance detector that responds to emotional human faces because it identifies their structural configuration as potentially important for the observer [34].”

“of biological significance from the environment (Sander et al. 2003) and the shaping of behavioral responses (Ousdal et al.”

“Baron-Cohen et al. (2000) posited that damage or dysfunction of the amygdala should be at the root of social impairments in ASDs and proposed the Amygdala Theory of Autism.”

“The alternative is that the amygdala has a more general role in emotional appraisal for which fear and likely anger, as suggested from our data, are the most effective elicitors (Sander et al., 2003).”

“…of these conditions provided a novel opportunity to compare amygdala responses under a range of aversive and appetitive conditions to determine if it serves a broader role as a " behavioral relevance " detector (Ousdal et al., 2008; Paton et al., 2006; Sander et al, 2003; Schoenbaum et al., 2003).”

“Yet most studies focused on the role of the amygdala or prefrontal cortex in generating or regulating emotional responses [17, 20, 41, 53, 59, 84].”

“Some studies in humans and pigs have shown that one structure fulfilling this relevance detection is the amygdala (Sander et al. 2003; Ousdal et al. 2008; Kalbe & Puppe 2010).”

“This proposal is consistent with several other proposals about the role of the amygdala in maintaining vigilance (Whalen 2007) and detection of salient or motivationally relevant stimuli (Adolphs 2010; Sander et al. 2003).”

“More specifically, the amygdala is considered as a system for relevance detection, i.e., necessary for detecting the extent to which stimulus events are relevant for the current needs, goals and values of the individual (Sander et al. 2003; Ousdal et al. 2008).”

“A P S Y C H O L O G I C A L C O N S T R U C T I O N A P P R O A C H T O P T S D”

“Others posit that the amygdala act as a relevance detector to biologically salient information (Sander et al., 2003) or even to ‘potential’ (but not necessarily actual) relevant stimuli (for a review, see Armony, 2013).”

“Introduction 2005; Sander et al., 2005a; Wiethoff et al., 2009) or nonverbal The amygdala is an important brain structure for detecting the affective information (Zald, 2003) that is most relevant for the current context of behavior (Sander et al., 2003).”

“…but not limited to fear conditioning [Ledoux et al., 1990], social and emotional processing [Adolphs et al., 2002; Phelps and LeDoux, 2005; Sander et al., 2003], processing stimulus relevance for the goals and motivations of the perceiver [Cunningham and Brosch, 2012] and the development…”

“A view promoted by Sander, Brosch and colleagues (Sander et al., 2003; Brosch et al., 2010) argues that the amygdala, rather than being simply a ‘fear module’, is involved in broader, subjective appraisal of the motivational relevance of a stimulus.”

“Considering the amygdala as a relevance detector in emotion processing [13, 38] we expected a significant difference in activation patterns among pedophile sex-offenders (attracted to boys; while viewing boys) compared to normal heterosexual control subjects.”

“In line with this view, the amygdala's role is to evaluate the behavioral salience and motivational properties of sensory stimuli, as well as to subsequently generate appropriate emotional, autonomic and motor responses through connections with hypothalamic, thalamic and cortical brain regions (Sander et al., 2003).”

“This view of the amygdala is similar to that put forward by others (Whalen et al., 1998; Holland and Gallagher, 1999; Sander et al., 2003; Adolphs et al., 2005).”

“It has recently been argued that the amygdala plays a role in coordinating the enhanced consolidation and recall of emotionally salient information relative to more affectively neutral contextual information [60], similar to the way it amplifies processing of salient information online during emotion recognition tasks…”

“…state remains unclear, but the significant increase in activation observed and subsequent avoidance is consistent with the proposal that the amygdala responded to a salient event that derived its aversive motivational properties through prior association with money loss (Sander et al., 2003 ).”

“The underlying mechanism likely involves brain structures in the limbic system and the amygdala in particular, which has been implicated in the implicit assessment of various stimuli (Sander et al., 2003) and judgments of social valence such as trustworthiness (Todorov & Engell, 2008; Winston et al.”

“In fact, there is also accumulating evidence from face-perception studies in normal [Fusar-Poli et al., 2009; Herry et al., 2007; Sander et al., 2003; Santos et al., 2011] and clinical populations [Piech et al., 2011; Terburg et al., 2012], challenging the notion that the amygdala is specifically…”

“Amygdala activity, in turn, responds reliably to environmental information that carries emotional, social, or motivational value, generally stimuli of evolutionary salience [106].”

“…in the amygdala (Lemche et al., 2006; Vrticˇka et al., 2008), a region associated with fear and personal relevance (Phelps & LeDoux, 2005; Sander, Grafman, & Zalla, 2003), while conversely, AV correlates with weaker response to positive social stimuli (smiling faces) in the ventral…”

“A network of several brain regions suggested to enable a rapid detection of emotionally and motivationally relevant stimuli includes the direct link between sensory pathways and the amygdala (Sander et al., 2003) as well as other subcortical (e.”

“Separating this relevance effect from the arousal effect is difficult, although appraisal theories only posit that stimuli appraised affectively relevant have facilitated access to attention (Brosch et al., 2013; Sander et al., 2003).”

“The most established functions are probably the storage of conditioned stimulus–unconditioned stimulus associations in fear conditioning, and its role in relevance detection [Sander et al., 2003].”

“In humans, amygdala activity signals motivational relevance 33,34 , whether for positive or negative events 35,37 , and promotes learning of associations with rewards or punishments 38 .”

“…brain regions involved in triggering an affective response (Ochsner et al., 2009; Lindquist et al., 2012), in large part because it is thought to signal the presence of goal-relevant stimuli, and emotions arise from appraisals of goal relevance (Sander et al., 2003; Cunningham and Brosch, 2012).”

“The amygdala detects and processes information about potentially relevant stimuli and their relationship to an individual's current goals or needs (Sander et al., 2003).”

“While exteroception refers to the perception of all external stimuli, the stimuli’s relevance to the self is processed by the Relevance Detector Network (RDN) with the amygdala as its primary node (22).”

“…have for example shown that merely viewing emotional pictures generated enhanced activity of the amygdala in adolescents as compared to adults or young children (Hare et al., 2008); this may be interpreted as a sign of higher relevance of emotional information in adolescence (Sander et al., 2003).”

“This enhancement occurs most consistently within the amygdala, which presumably serves as a relevance detector (Sander et al., 2003), supports identity processing (Rutishauser et al.”

“These findings confirm the amygdala’s role in encoding the perceived threat level of faces, as well as the more general assumption that the amygdala encodes the relevance or significance of a stimulus to the observer [94].”

“The present research adds to a growing compendium of evidence reframing the role of the amygdala in social perception (Todorov, 2012; Adolphs, 2010; Cunningham, Van Bavel, & Johnsen, 2008; Sander et al., 2003).”

“The amygdala is central to the perception and expression of anxiety in humans and other primates [Sander et al., 2003] especially in children [Amaral et al., 2003], with a diminution of its influence with normal aging [Bauman et al., 2004].”

“Keywords: emotion; valence; fMRI; amygdala; auditory cortex; prefrontal cortex r r”

“Amygdala Detecting and responding to affective stimuli [55, 56] Correlated with implicit moral attitude strength [57]”

“Given that the amygdala has been conceptualized as a ‘relevance detector’ (Sander et al., 2003), this finding suggests that for females, negative emotions are most relevant, whereas for males, positive and negative emotions are salient.”

“This framework resulted in interpreting data in such a way that the amygdala has generally become thought of as a “ rapid-response fear module ” (for a detailed rejection of this view, see Sander, Grafman, & Zalla, 2003).”

“First, in line with evidence of its involvement in the detection of salient events (Sander et al., 2003), the processing of unexpected musical chords (Koelsch, Fritz, et al., 2008), as well as tension in real music (Lehne et al., 2014), we predicted we would observe sensitivity to IC in the…”

“Although the specific neural mechanisms that underlie the selection of relevant positive stimuli in depression have not yet been elucidated, it is likely that the amygdala, because of its involvement in the processing of relevant([35]) and emotional stimuli, and the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which has been shown to reg…”

“58 The insula is involved in processing of emotional stimuli; particularly negative stimuli, in addition to interoceptive states.”

“It has been shown that the relevance of stimuli that can determine an enhanced amygdala response may depend on the novelty, informative value, and motivational significance of both positive and negative emotional stimuli (Sander et al., 2003; Lang and Bradley, 2010; Sabatinelli et al., 2011).”

“They found food reward-related activation attenuated by GSK1521498 only in the amygdala region of interest, a region reported to be involved in both appetitive and aversive processing and salience detection (Morrison and Salzman 2010; Sander et al. 2003).”

“Keywords: direct gaze; emotion; fMRI; hippocampus; memory r r”

“This concept of relevance detection has its origins in emotion psychology (Sander et al., 2003), in particular in appraisal theories of emotion (Sander et al.”

“Goals associated with discrete emotions (e.g., the goal of avoiding threat when fear) may promote processing of goal-relevant information and impair processing of information that is peripheral”

“Such a role has been proposed as a unifying explanation of a variety of neuroimaging and patient studies of the human amygdala, and as an alternative to the idea that the amygdala serves as a dedicated ‘fear module’ [57].”

“2002), but not all (Sander et al. 2003 ; Fitzgerald et al. 2006), previous studies have suggested.”

“These results are consistent with the view that the amygdala functions as a “relevance detector,” a concept first proposed by Sander et al. (2003).”

“stimuli might reflect the fact that the sensory stimuli are no longer of relevance for the individuals because the amygdala is thought to be essential in evaluating stimulus salience and in initiating behavioral responses (Sander et al. 2003).”

“This may appear at odds with the widely accepted idea of a prioritised processing of negative, threat-related stimuli (Adolphs, 2002; Ohman et al., 2001a, 2001b; Sander et al., 2003).”

“The amygdala, which in this study also exhibited activity and functional connectivity related to trait impulsivity, supports emotional coding of stimulus value, providing an emotional context, or arousal, that modulates responses to reward cues (Baxter and Murray, 2002; Anderson et al., 2003; Sander et al., 2003; Smal…”

“Emotional human facial stimuli specifically function to non-verbally communicate motive-relevant information to the perceiver (see [80–83] for the goal-relevance of human faces).”

“Although associated with fear and rage it may be involved more broadly in detecting stimulus relevance (Sander et al., 2003) disruption of which may lead to failure to recognise events that require a response.”

“The role of the amygdala in emotional signal detection is well established (44,45), and the temporal regions found in our study have been widely associated with both socioemotional (right .”

“The amygdala was argued to be neither a fear module, nor a negative-emotions-dedicated subsystem, but rather a relevance detector [81].”