Individuals' conceptual knowledge can flexibly influence emotion perception and the brain's representations of face categories, a study finds. Mounting behavioral evidence suggests that the perception of emotions may be shaped by conceptual knowledge, including memories and expectations, leading to variability in perception across individuals. Jeffrey Brooks, Jonathan Freeman, and colleagues combined functional MRI and behavioral experiments to examine the responses of 40 adult participants to 6 emotion categories: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The participants rated each category based on its conceptual relationship to 40 emotion features, including thoughts, sensations, and actions, such as crying, heart racing, and clenching fists. For each participant, the authors measured the conceptual similarity between pairs of the 6 different emotion categories by comparing the overlap in patterns of responses to the 40 items. In addition, neural similarity ratings between pairs of the different emotion categories were generated for each participant by comparing patterns of neural responses to images of emotional faces. At the individual level, conceptual similarity predicted neural similarity, specifically in the right fusiform gyrus, a brain region that plays a role in face perception. According to the authors, the findings suggest that conceptual knowledge can flexibly influence the brain's representations of face categories.
Article #18-16408: "The neural representation of facial-emotion categories reflects conceptual structure," by Jeffrey Brooks, Junichi Chikazoe, Norihiro Sadato, and Jonathan B. Freeman.
MEDIA CONTACTS: Jonathan Freeman, New York University, NY; tel: 212-998-7825; e-mail: jon.freeman@nyu.edu; Jeffrey Brooks, New York University, NY; e-mail: jeffreyallenbrooks@gmail.com
###
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences