ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2015
Preferential attention to animals and people is independent of the amygdala.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Stage-Specific Animate Attention Bias in Individuals with High and Low Autistic Traits: Behavioral and Eye-Tracking Evidence.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Unconscious Manipulation of Conceptual Representations with Decoded Neurofeedback Impacts Search Behavior.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- A revisit of the amygdala theory of autism: Twenty years after.Neuropsychologia · 2023Review
- Encoding of facial features by single neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus.Communications biology · 2021Article
- The basolateral amygdala regulation of complex cognitive behaviours in the five-choice serial reaction time task.Psychopharmacology · 2019Article
- Simultaneous Eye Tracking and Single-Neuron Recordings in Human Epilepsy Patients.Journal of visualized experiments : JoVE · 2019Article
- Brief Report: Atypical Visual Exploration in Autism Spectrum Disorder Cannot be Attributed to the Amygdala.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2019Article
- Generalized Unsafety Theory of Stress: Unsafe Environments and Conditions, and the Default Stress Response.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2018Review
- Face size biases emotion judgment through eye movement.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- The Change Detection Advantage for Animals: An Effect of Ancestral Priorities or Progeny of Experimental Design?i-Perception · 2016Article
- Natural environments, ancestral diets, and microbial ecology: is there a modern "paleo-deficit disorder"? Part I.Journal of physiological anthropology · 2015Review
- Autism spectrum disorder, but not amygdala lesions, impairs social attention in visual search.Neuropsychologia · 2014Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The amygdala is thought to play a critical role in detecting salient stimuli. Several studies have taken ecological approaches to investigating such saliency, and argue for domain-specific effects for processing certain natural stimulus categories, in particular faces and animals. Linking this to the amygdala, neurons in the human amygdala have been found to respond strongly to faces and also to animals. However, the amygdala's necessary role for such category-specific effects at the behavioral level remains untested. Here we tested four rare patients with bilateral amygdala lesions on an established change-detection protocol. Consistent with prior published studies, healthy controls showed reliably faster and more accurate detection of people and animals, as compared with artifacts and plants. So did all four amygdala patients: there were no differences in phenomenal change blindness, in behavioral reaction time to detect changes or in eye-tracking measures. The findings provide decisive evidence against a critical participation of the amygdala in rapid initial processing of attention to animate stimuli, suggesting that the necessary neural substrates for this phenomenon arise either in other subcortical structures (such as the pulvinar) or within the cortex itself.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.