Yale Bulletin and Calendar

November 17, 2006|Volume 35, Number 11|Two-Week Issue

Study shows seat of emotions in the brain
may also contribute to higher cognition

The amygdala is a central processing station in the brain for emotions, but Yale researchers report that the amygdala also plays a role in working memory, a higher cognitive function critical for reasoning and problem-solving.

In two different functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies with a total of 74 participants, researchers found that individual differences in amygdala activity predicted behavioral performance on a working memory task, according to a report in the Journal of Neuroscience.

"People with stronger amygdala responses during the working memory task also had faster response times," says Jeremy Grey, senior author of the study and assistant professor of psychology. "This effect held even when people were responding to neutral words, which can hardly be called emotional."

The subjects were asked to look either at words such as "rooster," "elbow" and "steel" or at faces of attractive men and women. They then were asked to indicate whether or not the current word or image matched the one they saw three frames earlier, which most people find quite challenging. Their brains were scanned while completing the tasks.

"Our findings are surprising because they show that a brain structure widely thought to be involved primarily, or perhaps even exclusively, in emotion processing is also involved in higher cognition, even when there is no emotional content," Grey says. "In fact, because it seemed so counterintuitive, we thought it was really important to replicate the result, which we did."

He and his team hypothesize that the amygdala may serve, among other purposes, a general vigilance function aimed at preparing people to better cope with challenging situations and also the ability to sort information according to its relevance to the task at hand.

"Because these findings are surprising," says the lead author, Alexandre Schaefer, a former postdoctoral fellow in Gray's lab and now a lecturer at Leeds University, United Kingdom, "they may help further our understanding of how emotion and cognition interact in the human brain."

-- By Jacqueline Weaver

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Campus Notes