Brain, Vol. 122, No. 4, 779-783,
April 1999
© 1999 Oxford University Press
The human amygdala plays an important role in gaze monitoring
A PET study
1 IDAC, Tohoku University, 2 Aoba Brain Imaging Reseach Center, Sendai, 3 National Institute for Longevity Sciences, Obu and 4 Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Inuyama, Japan
Correspondence to:
Dr. R. Kawashima, Department of Nuclear Medicine and Radiology, IDAC, Tohoku University, 4–1 Seiryocho, Aobaku, Sendai, 980–8575 Japan E-mail: ryuta{at}idac.tohoku.ac.jp
Social contact often initially depends on ascertaining the direction of the other person's gaze. We determined the brain areas involved in gaze monitoring by a functional neuroimaging study. Discrimination between the direction of gaze significantly activated a region in the left amygdala during eye-contact and no eye-contact tasks to the same extent. However, a region in the right amygdala was specifically activated only during the eye-contact task. Results confirm that the left amygdala plays a general role in the interpretation of eye gaze direction, and that the activity of the right amygdala of the subject increases when another individual's gaze is directed towards him. This suggests that the human amygdala plays a role in reading social signals from the face.
PET; regional cerebral blood flow; amygdala; gaze direction discrimination; social contact
ANCOVA = analysis of covariance; rCBF = regional cerebral blood flow; SPM = statistical parametric map
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