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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on March 1, 2007
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm002
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

As Time Goes By: Temporal Constraints on Emotional Activation of Inferior Medial Prefrontal Cortex

Jacob Geday1,2, Ron Kupers1 and Albert Gjedde1

1 PET Center, 2 Neurology Department, Aarhus University Hospitals, Aarhus, Denmark

Address correspondence to Jacob Geday MD, FAS, PET Center, Aarhus University Hospitals, Norrebrogade 44, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. Email: geday{at}pet.auh.dk.

To investigate the influence of stimulus duration on emotional processing, we measured changes of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in 14 healthy subjects who viewed neutral or emotional images presented for 3 or 6 s. Presentation for 3 s reproduced the previous result of higher rCBF in inferior medial prefrontal cortex (IMPC) during neutral than emotional stimulation. Six-second presentation reverted this relationship, with activity in IMPC being higher during emotional stimulation. Prolonged stimulus presentation attenuated the rise of rCBF associated with emotions in left parietal cortex and cerebellar hemisphere. We speculate that the different rCBF during neutral and emotional stimulation for 6 s is a consequence of attention divided between the emotional stimuli and their associations. Thus, prefrontal activity rises when a cognitive task accompanies emotional stimulation because several cognitive processes compete for attention. The IMPC may serve the mechanism of attention underlying the concept of a default mode of brain function, selecting among competitive inputs from multiple brain regions rather than just processing emotions. The results emphasize the importance of implicit cognitive processing during emotional activation, however, unintended.

Key Words: attention • default mode of brain function • emotion • inferior medial prefrontal cortex • perception • stimulus duration


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