Abstract
The pulvinar is important in selective attention, particularly to visual stimuli under the focus of attention. However, the pulvinar is assumed to process emotional stimuli even outside the focus of attention, because of its tight connection with the amygdala. We therefore investigated how unattended emotional stimuli affect the pulvinar and its effective connectivity (EC) while considering individual differences in selective attention. fMRI in 41 healthy human subjects revealed that the amygdala, but not the pulvinar, more strongly responded to unattended fearful faces than to unattended neutral faces (UF > UN), although we observed greater EC from the pulvinar to the amygdala. Interestingly, individuals with biased attention toward threat (i.e., attentional bias) showed significantly increased activity (UF > UN) and reduced grey matter volume in the pulvinar. These individuals also exhibited stronger EC from the pulvinar to the attention-related frontoparietal network (FPN), whereas individuals with greater attentional control showed more enhanced EC from the pulvinar to the amygdala, but not the FPN (UF > UN). The pulvinar may filter unattended emotional stimuli whose sensitivity depends on individual threat-related attentional bias. The connectivity patterns of the pulvinar may thus be determined based on individual differences in threat-related attentional bias and attentional control.
Highlights
Lateral, inferior, and medial nuclei), and each has diverse connections with extensive cortical areas and subcortical structures[9,12]
Using the pulvinar defined by the Wake Forest University (WFU) PickAtlas[29,30] as a seed region, PPI analysis demonstrated significantly greater effective connectivity (EC) from the left pulvinar to the right amygdala (Fig. 2) when unattended fearful faces (UF) were processed
A portion including the right medial and lateral pulvinar nuclei were more strongly connected with the Supplementary motor area (SMA) and the supramarginal gyrus (SMG) (Table 2), suggesting that the pulvinar more strongly interacted with the attention-related frontoparietal network (FPN) during the processing of UF than that of unattended neutral faces (UN)
Summary
Lateral, inferior, and medial nuclei), and each has diverse connections with extensive cortical areas and subcortical structures[9,12]. A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study showed significant activation of dorsomedial pulvinar, homologous to Pdm in monkeys, during detection of luminance changes in flickering neutral stimuli, but only when these stimuli were attended to[23] Another fMRI study demonstrated that the (entire) pulvinar exhibited stronger activation when subjects discriminated subtle differences in a neutral object’s position during attended conditions compared to unattended conditions[24]. These findings indicate that the pulvinar, or its dorsomedial part, directs selective attention to behaviourally-relevant or salient stimuli within the focused visual field while filtering out distracting information. This helped us to determine if the pulvinar has a specific role in emotional attention or if it is only involved in non-emotional general attention
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