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Emotional learning promotes perceptual predictions by remodeling stimulus representation in visual cortex.

ABSTRACT: Emotions exert powerful effects on perception and memory, notably by modulating activity in sensory cortices so as to capture attention. Here, we examine whether emotional significance acquired by a visual stimulus can also change its cortical representation by linking neuronal populations coding for different memorized versions of the same stimulus, a mechanism that would facilitate recognition across different appearances. Using fMRI, we show that after pairing a given face with threat through conditioning, viewing this face activates the representation of another viewpoint of the same person, which itself was never conditioned, leading to robust repetition-priming across viewpoints in the ventral visual stream (including medial fusiform, lateral occipital, and anterior temporal cortex). We also observed a functional-anatomical segregation for coding view-invariant and view-specific identity information. These results indicate emotional signals may induce plasticity of stimulus representations in visual cortex, serving to generate new sensory predictions about different appearances of threat-associated stimuli.

SUBMITTER: Meaux E

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6856165 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Emotional learning promotes perceptual predictions by remodeling stimulus representation in visual cortex.

Meaux E E Sterpenich V V Vuilleumier P P

Scientific reports 20191114 1

Emotions exert powerful effects on perception and memory, notably by modulating activity in sensory cortices so as to capture attention. Here, we examine whether emotional significance acquired by a visual stimulus can also change its cortical representation by linking neuronal populations coding for different memorized versions of the same stimulus, a mechanism that would facilitate recognition across different appearances. Using fMRI, we show that after pairing a given face with threat through ...[more]

PMID: 31727912

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Dataset Information

Emotional learning promotes perceptual predictions by remodeling stimulus representation in visual cortex.

Publications

Emotional learning promotes perceptual predictions by remodeling stimulus representation in visual cortex.

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