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.

Moderate alcohol consumption in humans impairs feature binding in visual perception but not across perception and action.

Animal studies suggest a relationship between activation of the cholinergic system and neural synchronization, which again has been suggested to mediate feature binding. We investigated whether suppressing cholinergic activity through moderate alcohol consumption in healthy humans affects behavioral measures of feature binding in visual perception and across perception and action. Indeed, evidence of the binding of shape and color, and of shape and location, of visual objects disappeared after alcohol consumption, whereas bindings between object features and the manual response were unaffected.