Task-irrelevant emotional faces impact BOLD responses more for prosaccades than antisaccades in a mixed saccade fMRI task. (15th December 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Pierce, Jordan E.; Clancy, Elizabeth; Petro, Nathan M.; Dodd, Michael D.; Neta, Maital
• Is Part Of: Neuropsychologia. Number 177(2022)
• Publication Date: 2022-12-15
• Subjects: Antisaccade -- Cognitive control -- Emotion -- Face processing -- fMRI; Neuropsychology -- Periodicals; Neurology -- Periodicals; Psychophysiology -- Periodicals; Neuropsychologie -- Périodiques; Neuropsychology; Periodicals; Electronic journals; 616.8
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108428
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0028-3932

Abstract

Abstract: Cognitive control allows individuals to flexibly and efficiently perform tasks by attending to relevant stimuli while inhibiting distraction from irrelevant stimuli. The antisaccade task assesses cognitive control by requiring participants to inhibit a prepotent glance towards a peripheral stimulus and generate an eye movement to the mirror image location. This task can be administered with various contextual manipulations to investigate how factors such as trial timing or emotional content interact with cognitive control. In the current study, 26 healthy adults completed a mixed antisaccade and prosaccade fMRI task that included task irrelevant emotional faces and gap/overlap timing. The results showed typical antisaccade and gap behavioral effects with greater BOLD activation in frontal and parietal brain regions for antisaccade and overlap trials. Conversely, there were no differences in behavior based on the emotion of the task irrelevant face, but trials with neutral faces had greater activation in widespread visual regions than trials with angry faces, particularly for prosaccade and overlap trials. Together, these effects suggest that a high level of cognitive control and inhibition was required throughout the task, minimizing the impact of the face presentation on saccade behavior, but leading to increased attention to the neutral faces on overlap prosaccade trials when both the task cue (look towards) and emotion stimulus (neutral, non-threatening) facilitated disinhibition of visual processing. Highlights: Salient emotional stimuli such as faces impact cognitive control implementation. The current study used a mixed anti- and prosaccade fMRI task with emotional faces. Prosaccade BOLD responses were attenuated in visual regions following angry faces. Heightened inhibition for antisaccade trials limited the impact of emotional expressions.