Editorial: Pathways for Rapid Visual Processing: Subcortical Contributions to Emotion, Threat, Biological Relevance, and Motivated Behavior

Editorial on the Research Topic Pathways for Rapid Visual Processing: Subcortical Contributions to Emotion, Threat, Biological Relevance, and Motivated Behavior From birth, the visual system is the predominant sensory system that provides information for primate and human understanding, visuomotor actions, emotion, cognition and interaction with the outside world. While overall pulvinar activation was lower for schizophrenia compared to both ASD and control groups for emotional faces, further analysis confirmed this effect for lateral pulvinar (that receives large input from V1 (Purushothaman et al., 2012) and plays a large role in consciousness) and medial subdivisions, while the ASD group only showed higher activation in the inferior pulvinar compared to schizophrenia and control groups. [...]Martinez et al. argue that integration between subcortical and cortical visual pathways are important for social cognition, and abnormalities in these circuits are important for complex neurocognitive disorders. McFadyen et al. argue for a “survival hypothesis” in which biologically relevant stimuli (i.e., fearful faces in this case) are given priority access to conscious awareness, particularly when unexpected, and more-so for those with higher anxiety. [...]neural mechanisms appear capable of differentially prioritizing expected and unexpected stimuli depending on the biological relevance. The authors provide a systematic review concluding that subconscious presentation of phobic stimuli can result in extinction of the phobic response, without the typical subjective distress associated with standard exposure therapies involving the conscious experience of phobic stimuli.