The human amygdala plays an important role in gaze monitoring

TLDR

Social contact often initially depends on ascertaining the direction of the other person's gaze. Using functional neuroimaging, we identified the brain areas involved in gaze monitoring. The study found that gaze discrimination activated the left amygdala in both eye‑contact and no‑eye‑contact conditions, while the right amygdala was selectively engaged only during eye‑contact, indicating that the left amygdala generally interprets gaze direction and the right amygdala responds when another’s gaze is directed toward the observer, supporting a role for the amygdala in decoding social signals from faces.

Abstract

Social contact often initially depends on ascertaining the direction of the other person's gaze. We determined the brain areas involved in gaze monitoring by a functional neuroimaging study. Discrimination between the direction of gaze significantly activated a region in the left amygdala during eye-contact and no eye-contact tasks to the same extent. However, a region in the right amygdala was specifically activated only during the eye-contact task. Results confirm that the left amygdala plays a general role in the interpretation of eye gaze direction, and that the activity of the right amygdala of the subject increases when another individual's gaze is directed towards him. This suggests that the human amygdala plays a role in reading social signals from the face.