Neural correlates of emotion- and reward-driven attentional capture

In recent years, affective neuroscience has emerged as an important discipline to study the brain mechanisms of affect and emotion by employing various methods, ranging from neuroimaging and neurobiology through to drug and lesion studies (Davidson et al., 2003; Deak, 2011; Kringelbach, 2005, Kringelbach & Berridge 2008; LeDoux & Phelps 2000; Leknes & Tracey 2008). Ample research has demonstrated that emotionally significant and rewarding information often produces strong effects on other processing systems, such as cognition, attention, or memory. Here we discuss the effects of emotion and reward on attention and the neural substrates underlying this phenomenon. Two modes of attentional control are usually implicated in the deployment of selective attention (Anderson & Folk, 2010). The first is guided by our goals and/or intentions (voluntary or endogenous attention) and the second is guided by the physical salience of the stimuli or by task-irrelevant stimuli (involuntary or exogenous attention). However, recent research has shown that affective salience of stimuli can also influence attention through mechanism shared with both endogenous and exogenous attention (Vuilleumier & Brosch, 2009)