Dataset Information

Brain Processes While Struggling With Evidence Accumulation During Facial Emotion Recognition: An ERP Study.

ABSTRACT: The human brain is tuned to recognize emotional facial expressions in faces having a natural upright orientation. The relative contributions of featural, configural, and holistic processing to decision-making are as yet poorly understood. This study used a diffusion decision model (DDM) of decision-making to investigate the contribution of early face-sensitive processes to emotion recognition from physiognomic features (the eyes, nose, and mouth) by determining how experimental conditions tapping those processes affect early face-sensitive neuroelectric reflections (P100, N170, and P250) of processes determining evidence accumulation at the behavioral level. We first examined the effects of both stimulus orientation (upright vs. inverted) and stimulus type (photographs vs. sketches) on behavior and neuroelectric components (amplitude and latency). Then, we explored the sources of variance common to the experimental effects on event-related potentials (ERPs) and the DDM parameters. Several results suggest that the N170 indicates core visual processing for emotion recognition decision-making: (a) the additive effect of stimulus inversion and impoverishment on N170 latency; and (b) multivariate analysis suggesting that N170 neuroelectric activity must be increased to counteract the detrimental effects of face inversion on drift rate and of stimulus impoverishment on the stimulus encoding component of non-decision times. Overall, our results show that emotion recognition is still possible even with degraded stimulation, but at a neurocognitive cost, reflecting the extent to which our brain struggles to accumulate sensory evidence of a given emotion. Accordingly, we theorize that: (a) the P100 neural generator would provide a holistic frame of reference to the face percept through categorical encoding; (b) the N170 neural generator would maintain the structural cohesiveness of the subtle configural variations in facial expressions across our experimental manipulations through coordinate encoding of the facial features; and (c) building on the previous configural processing, the neurons generating the P250 would be responsible for a normalization process adapting to the facial features to match the stimulus to internal representations of emotional expressions.

SUBMITTER: Yang YF

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7497730 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Brain Processes While Struggling With Evidence Accumulation During Facial Emotion Recognition: An ERP Study.

Yang Yu-Fang YF Brunet-Gouet Eric E Burca Mariana M Kalunga Emmanuel K EK Amorim Michel-Ange MA

Frontiers in human neuroscience 20200903

The human brain is tuned to recognize emotional facial expressions in faces having a natural upright orientation. The relative contributions of featural, configural, and holistic processing to decision-making are as yet poorly understood. This study used a diffusion decision model (DDM) of decision-making to investigate the contribution of early face-sensitive processes to emotion recognition from physiognomic features (the eyes, nose, and mouth) by determining how experimental conditions tappin ...[more]

PMID: 33100986

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Project description:BACKGROUND: Impaired social functioning is a common symptom of individuals with developmental disruptions in callosal connectivity. Among these developmental conditions, agenesis of the corpus callosum provides the most extreme and clearly identifiable example of callosal disconnection. To date, deficits in nonliteral language comprehension, humor, theory of mind, and social reasoning have been documented in agenesis of the corpus callosum. Here, we examined a basic social ability as yet not investigated in this population: recognition of facial emotion and its association with social gaze. METHODS: Nine individuals with callosal agenesis and nine matched controls completed four tasks involving emotional faces: emotion recognition from upright and inverted faces, gender recognition, and passive viewing. Eye-tracking data were collected concurrently on all four tasks and analyzed according to designated facial regions of interest. RESULTS: Individuals with callosal agenesis exhibited impairments in recognizing emotions from upright faces, in particular lower accuracy for fear and anger, and these impairments were directly associated with diminished attention to the eye region. The callosal agenesis group exhibited greater consistency in emotion recognition across conditions (upright vs. inverted), with poorest performance for fear identification in both conditions. The callosal agenesis group also had atypical facial scanning (lower fractional dwell time in the eye region) during gender naming and passive viewing of faces, but they did not differ from controls on gender naming performance. The pattern of results did not differ when taking into account full-scale intelligence quotient or presence of autism spectrum symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: Agenesis of the corpus callosum results in a pattern of atypical facial scanning characterized by diminished attention to the eyes. This pattern suggests that reduced callosal connectivity may contribute to the development and maintenance of emotion processing deficits involving reduced attention to others' eyes.

Dataset Information

Brain Processes While Struggling With Evidence Accumulation During Facial Emotion Recognition: An ERP Study.

Publications

Brain Processes While Struggling With Evidence Accumulation During Facial Emotion Recognition: An ERP Study.

Similar Datasets

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