Abstract :
Keywords Amygdala; Emotion; Attention; ILFP; Face processing Abstract Face processing is biased by emotional and voluntarily directed attention, both of which modulate processing in distributed cortical areas. The amygdala is assumed to contribute to an attentional bias for emotional faces, although its interaction with directed attention awaits further clarification. Here, we studied the interaction of emotion and attention during face processing via scalp EEG potentials of healthy participants and intracranial EEG (iEEG) recordings of the right amygdala in one patient. Three randomized blocks consisting of angry, neutral, and happy facial expressions were presented, and one expression was denoted as the target category in each block. Happy targets were detected fastest and most accurately both in the group study and by the iEEG patient. Occipital scalp potentials revealed emotion differentiation for happy faces in the early posterior negativity (EPN) around 300 ms after stimulus onset regardless of the target condition. A similar response to happy faces occurred in the amygdala only for happy targets. On the scalp, a late positive potential (LPP, around 600 ms) enhancement for targets occurred for all target conditions alike. A simultaneous late signal in the amygdala was largest for emotional targets. No late signal enhancements were found for neutral targets in the amygdala. Cortical modulations, by contrast, showed both attention-independent effects of emotion and emotion-independent effects of attention. These results demonstrate an attention-dependence of amygdala activity during the processing of facial expressions and partly independent cortical mechanisms. Author Affiliation: (a) Department of Psychology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany (b) Institute of Medical Psychology and Systems Neuroscience, University of Münster, Münster, Germany (c) Clinical Neuropsychology and Epilepsy Research, Medical School OWL, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany (d) Department of Epileptology (Krankenhaus Mara), Bielefeld University, Medical School OWL, Bielefeld, Germany (e) Laboratory for Clinical Neuroscience, Centre for Biomedical Technology, Technical University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain (f) Department of Experimental Psychology, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain * Correspondence to: Bielefeld University, Department of Psychology, P.O. Box 10 01 31, D-33501 Bielefeld, Germany. Article History: Received 14 January 2022; Revised 13 July 2022; Accepted 14 July 2022 Byline: Enya M. Weidner [enya.weidner@uni-bielefeld.de] (a,*), Sebastian Schindler (b), Philip Grewe (c,d), Stephan Moratti (e,f), Christian G. Bien (d), Johanna Kissler (a)