Feature binding and affect: Emotional modulation of visuo-motor integration

The primate cortex represents the external world in a distributed fashion, which calls for a mechanism that integrates and binds the features of a perceived or processed event. Animal and patients studies provide evidence that feature binding in the visual cortex is driven by the muscarinic-cholinergic system, whereas visuo-motor integration may be under dopaminergic control. Consistent with this scenario, we present indication that the binding of visual and action features is modulated by emotions through the probable stimulation of the dopaminergic system. Interestingly, the impact of emotions on binding was restricted to tasks in which shape was task-relevant, suggesting that extracting affective information is not automatic but requires attention to shape. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.