Top-down modulation of attention by emotion

Due to their evolutionary salience, threatrelated stimuli, such as snakes, spiders, and angry faces constitute a special class of stimuli believed to capture attention in an involuntary, bottom-up manner. Most research in affective neuroscience has focused on unraveling neural pathways that support this “automatic” capture of attention by emotional stimuli (Vuilleumier and Driver, 2007). However, it is well known that in addition to stimulus-driven bottom-up factors (Itti and Koch, 2001), attention is guided by goal-driven, top-down factors (Hopfinger et al., 2000) such as anticipated locations and features of upcoming targets (Moran and Desimone, 1985; Treue and Martinez Trujillo, 1999). In real life, we often utilize emotional information endogenously to guide our attention, for example, when looking for cars while crossing a street or for a restaurant when hungry. These anticipatory search behaviors, aimed at detecting sources of potential threat or reward are deployed in a wide range of habitats from the savannah to social gatherings. Below, we review behavioral and neural data that highlight the importance of emotional factors in top-down voluntary guidance of attention. Based on these findings, we espouse a shift in emphasis from examining emotional factors as primarily impacting attention in a bottom-up manner to examining them in an endogenous, voluntary role wherein emotional information is strategically utilized to guide perception and attention. Cognitive behavioral formulations of anxiety have proposed an important role for threat-related schemata in the development and maintenance of anxiety (Beck, 1976; Mogg et al., 1989). In light of this, research examining the role of expectation and anticipatory attention toward threat will contribute not only to a more comprehensive understanding of normal emotion-attention interactions but also to our understanding of the development and maintenance of anxiety.