Short communicationAmygdala volume predicts patterns of eye fixation in rhesus monkeys
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Acknowledgements
The work presented here was supported entirely by the intramural research program of the National Institutes of Health, NIMH. The authors wish to acknowledge the technical assistance and training in amygdala tracing provided by Julia Scott at the University of California – Davis. We also are indebted to the veterinary and animal care staff of the NIH animal facility in Poolesville and all of the staff at the NIMH primate core.
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2019, Neurobiology of Learning and MemoryCitation Excerpt :In eye-tracking paradigms, macaques can process two-dimensional face stimuli as faces (Sliwa, Duhamel, Pascalis, & Wirth, 2011) and, like humans, focus more on the eye region than other parts of the face (Dahl, Wallraven, Bülthoff, & Logothetis, 2009; Gothard, Erickson, & Amaral, 2004). Eye-tracking studies in rhesus macaque infants can further contribute to our understanding of how this preference develops in primates (Paukner, Bower, Simpson, & Suomi, 2013; Paukner, Simpson, Ferrari, Mrozek, & Suomi, 2014; Simpson, Jakobsen, et al., 2017; Simpson, Miller, Ferrari, Suomi, & Paukner, 2016; Zhang, Noble, Winslow, Pine, & Nelson, 2012). For example, three-week-old macaques already look longer at faces than non-face stimuli (Simpson, Jakobsen, et al., 2017) and look more at normal versus atypical linearly arranged faces (Paukner et al., 2013).
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2018, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral ReviewsCitation Excerpt :The amygdala’s response to faces is also dependent on the motivational state of the perceiving individual; Radke et al., 2015 discovered that testosterone administration biased individuals towards threat approach and increased amygdala activation, but decreased activity during threat avoidance. Anatomical differences affect facial reception as well; Zhang et al., 2012 found a strong correlation in monkeys between larger amygdala and longer periods of gazing into the eye region of other monkeys. There is also evidence that the function of the amygdala in interpreting gaze changes throughout development, with amygdala size in children positively correlated to cognitive mental state inferences and in adults to emotional ones (Rice et al., 2014).
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2018, Experimental NeurologyCitation Excerpt :Eye-tracking outcome measures are highly relevant to ASD, as converging evidence from numerous experimental paradigms indicate that individuals with ASD demonstrate diminished attention to social stimuli across development (Chita-Tegmark, 2016). Adaptation of human eye-tracking paradigms for use in nonhuman primates provides an opportunity to evaluate social attention (Paukner et al., 2014; Simpson et al., 2017a; Simpson et al., 2016a; Simpson et al., 2016b; Paukner et al., 2013), and better identify neural circuitry underlying social processing (Zhang et al., 2012). The use of noninvasive eye-tracking in the nonhuman primate model will provide a powerful tool to evaluate novel preventative and therapeutic interventions in future studies and can improve translation from animal models to clinical populations (Senju & Johnson, 2009).
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2015, Trends in NeurosciencesCitation Excerpt :A similar relationship has been found between the volume of the macaque amygdala and social status [17]. When exposing macaques to visual stimuli of other individuals on a computer screen, amygdala volume correlates with the extent to which an individual fixates on the eye region of faces [18], and lesions of the monkey amygdala reduce fixations onto eyes in faces [19]. Macaques with experimentally induced amygdala lesions show blunted emotional responses to fear-inducing and novel stimuli [20].
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2013, NeuronCitation Excerpt :Furthermore, neurological patients with focal bilateral amygdala lesions show intriguing parallels to the pattern of facial feature processing seen in ASD, also failing to fixate and use the eye region of the face (Adolphs et al., 2005). The link between the amygdala and fixation onto the eye region of faces (Dalton et al., 2005; Kleinhans et al., 2011; Kliemann et al., 2012) is also supported by a correlation between amygdala volume and eye fixation in studies of monkeys (Zhang et al., 2012), and by neuroimaging studies in healthy participants that have found correlations between the propensity to make a saccade toward the eye region and blood oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal in the amygdala (Gamer and Büchel, 2009). The amygdala’s role in face processing is clearly borne out by electrophysiological data: single neurons in the amygdala respond strongly to images of faces, in humans (Fried et al., 1997; Rutishauser et al., 2011) as in monkeys (Gothard et al., 2007; Kuraoka and Nakamura, 2007).
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