Questions for:
The Enigma of the Amygdala: On Its Contribution to Human Emotion,
Cognitive-Emotional Interactions: Listen to the Brain
John P. Aggleton and Andrew W. Young; Joseph LeDoux
Instructions
These questions concern the sections assigned to the groups. You may find that the questions
overlap with each other. You do not have to follow the order of the questions, or divide your
information in the same way the questions do, in your presentation. You should just use these
questions to guide your presentation, so that in the end it is a logical presentation of the information
that would satisfy the questions. If you feel that a major and needed point in your section has not
been included in the questions, include it.
Any time you see “(thought)” it means you are to produce some of your own thinking for the
presentation, but the question will never appear on the essay tests (like the others may).
Note that while some groups have fewer questions, all groups cover the same number of
pages, so the answers to fewer questions will be longer.
INCORPORATE ALL FIGURES IN YOUR SECTION INTO YOUR POWERPOINTS
In the first part of the class, though you may not have realized it, we covered probably the
three most significant paradigm shifts in modern neuroscience:
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The neuroscience of social behavior, a brand new field
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The dorsal and ventral routes of information processing (visual, as it happens, and this
is convenient since humans’ visual perception is their primary one)
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The linking of cognition and long-missing emotion
Now, we will gain a more thorough understanding of emotion in the brain. Until the 1990s
people did not study emotion in the brain much, or for that matter, in behavior, since it was
difficult to define precisely enough for there to be agreement about how to do research on it.
Bechara brought emotion back into the mainstream with the Iowa Gambling Task research.
LeDoux at the same time began to see his decades of meticulous research on amygdala fear
conditioning bear fruit. These and others have laid out the cognitive neuroscience of emotion,
and we will now cover the most important chapters in the book by the same name. While the
readings have more pages, the pages have fewer words, and the content is easier reading.
ARTICLE 1
Section 1, Group 1: Beginning to P 114, “systematically investigated.”
What are the differential effects of damage referred to in the chapter? Has this discrepancy been
resolved?
Brown and Schafer began a line of research that led to much knowledge of the amygdala. Summarize
this body of research and its major findings.
What do the rhinal cortices have to do with the changing picture of amygdala function? Discuss how
this has been realized and its effect on thinking about the amygdala.
(thought) What does the methodology of ablation or lesioning have to do with progress in our
understanding of the amygdala? Imagine the ideal technique that would prevent such problems in
neuroscience in the future.
Section 2, Group 2: Page 114 “Selective amygdala damage is rare…” to end.
In humans, how might the effect of damage to subregions of the amygdala be studied? How
successful has research dealing with existing lesions been? With clinically created lesions?
Are the effects of amygdala damage in humans similar or not similar to those in monkeys?
(thought) Please show a picture of a macaque brain and a human brain, that shows the gross
anatomical structure. Point out where amygdala is in each. If damage to the amygdala is different in
humans and monkeys, could this be due to different patterns of connectivity from amygdala to other
structures?
What do the specific patients referred to tell us about amygdala function (don’t go into a lot of detail
about each, just summarize briefly)
Describe how research into the relationship between amygdala and emotional memory is conducted.
What do studies by LeDoux and colleagues, Angrilli and colleagues, McGaugh and colleagues tell us
about amygdala function?
What does research on patients with Urbach-Wiether disease tell us (describe this disease first)
ARTICLE 2
Section 3, Group 3: Beginning to 138 Figures
What do theory of mind, cognition, and emotion have to do with each other?
LeDoux recaps some classic definitions of fear. Recap these.
(thought) How do we (LeDoux and his contemporaries) study fear? Do all varieties of fear fit with this
conditioned fear approach?
Describe the neural substrate or mechanisms underlying fear, as defined by LeDoux.
What system accomplishes parallel processing? What does this mean? What advantage is there to
it?
Explain the significance of firing patterns in LA (and what LA is, a couple pictures might help)
What is the “conditioned network?”
What is LTP and what does it have to do with amygdala learning? (a bit of googling might help with
LTP)
Section 4, Group 4: Page 139 to end
(thought) What use is fear? Why might the amygdala have evolved?
LeDoux turns now to connecting the amygdala and cognitive processing. What sort of cognitive
processing does he address first? WHY is there a connection between it and amygdala? Describe the
connection(s).
(thought) Speculate on what neural circuits might underlie social anxiety.
How do we know that context is an important part of fear conditioning experiments? What does this
have to do with hippocampus (a bit of googling might yield a picture of hippocampal function)? With
the amygdala?
Discuss what memory systems in the brain may each be responsible for, and how they work together.
How do the medial frontal cortex and amygdala work together to establish meaning?
Lateral PFC is where we believe working memory is, and whatever we are working on is what is at
any moment the content of our consciousness. Usually this claim refers to current information
processing, not dissimilar to what a computer does. Do subjective feelings qualify as part of
consciousness?
Where do feelings come from?