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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on May 8, 2007
Cerebral Cortex 2008 18(1):145-150; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm040
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Rising Sound Intensity: An Intrinsic Warning Cue Activating the Amygdala

Dominik R. Bach1, Hartmut Schächinger2, John G. Neuhoff3, Fabrizio Esposito4, Francesco Di Salle5, Christoph Lehmann1, Marcus Herdener1, Klaus Scheffler6 and Erich Seifritz1,7

1 University Hospital of Psychiatry, University of Bern, 3000 Bern, Switzerland, 2 Department of Clinical Physiology, FB I—Psychobiology, University of Trier, 54290 Trier, Germany, 3 Department of Psychology, The College of Wooster, Wooster, OH 44691, USA, 4 Department of Neurological Sciences, University of Naples Federico II, 80127 Naples, Italy, 5 Department of Neuroscience, University of Pisa, 56127 Pisa, Italy, 6 Department of Radiology, University of Basel, 4031 Basel, Switzerland, 7 Department of Psychiatry, University of Basel, 4025 Basel, Switzerland

Address correspondence to Dominik R. Bach, Universitäre Psychiatrische Dienste Bern, Bolligenstrasse 111, 3000 Bern 60, Switzerland. Email: bach{at}puk.unibe.ch.

Human subjects overestimate the change of rising intensity sounds compared with falling intensity sounds. Rising sound intensity has therefore been proposed to be an intrinsic warning cue. In order to test this hypothesis, we presented rising, falling, and constant intensity sounds to healthy humans and gathered psychophysiological and behavioral responses. Brain activity was measured using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. We found that rising compared with falling sound intensity facilitates autonomic orienting reflex and phasic alertness to auditory targets. Rising intensity sounds produced neural activity in the amygdala, which was accompanied by activity in intraparietal sulcus, superior temporal sulcus, and temporal plane. Our results indicate that rising sound intensity is an elementary warning cue eliciting adaptive responses by recruiting attentional and physiological resources. Regions involved in cross-modal integration were activated by rising sound intensity, while the right-hemisphere phasic alertness network could not be supported by this study.

Key Words: amygdala • auditory looming • fMRI • orienting reflex • phasic alertness • skin conductance response


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