Emotional facial expressions capture attention

Objective: To determine whether the emotional significance of stimuli can influence spatial attention. Background: Motivational and emotional factors may affect attention toward stimuli. However, this has never been examined in brain-damaged patients who present with unilateral inattention due to left spatial neglect. Methods: The authors studied three patients with chronic left neglect and visual extinction after right parietal stroke. Shapes or faces with neutral, happy, or angry expressions were briefly presented in the right, left, or both visual fields. On unilateral trials, the patients detected all stimuli equally on both sides. On bilateral trials, they extinguished faces in the contralesional field much less often than shapes, and faces with happy or angry facial expressions much less than faces with a neutral expression. Conclusion: Facial features and emotional expressions can be analyzed despite lying on the unattended side, and may influence the spatial distribution of attention. These findings support the view that attention is controlled by neural mechanisms involving not only frontoparietal areas but also limbic components in cingulate cortex and amygdala, which may interact with ventral visual areas in the temporal lobe to detect affective value and prioritize attention to salient stimuli.