Affective and motivational control of vision

It is increasingly recognized that affective values associated with visual stimuli can influence visual perception, attention, and eye movements. Recent research has begun to uncover the brain mechanisms mediating these phenomena. The present review summarizes the main paradigms and findings demonstrating emotional and motivational influences on visual processing.

Several pathways have been identified for enhancing neural responses of cortical visual areas to stimuli with intrinsic emotional value (e.g., facial expressions, social scenes, and others), including projections from the amygdala and ascending modulatory neurotransmitter systems from the brainstem. These pathways can guide attention and gaze to emotionally salient information with either negative (threatening) or positive (rewarding) associations. In addition, abundant research in recent years suggests that probabilistic reward learning can lead to powerful biases in visual attention and saccade control through subcortical pathways connecting visual areas with basal ganglia and superior colliculus. Time-resolved neuroimaging using electroencephalography or magnetoencephalography has begun to tackle the time course of these effects, and can now be complemented by neuroimaging and neurophysiology recordings in monkey.

These findings have implications for understanding and assessing affective biases in perception and attention in patients with psychiatric disorders, such as phobias, depression, and addiction, but also open new avenues for rehabilitation in neurological patients with attention disorders.