Yang Xiaoli, Xu Junhai, Cao Linjing, Li Xianglin, Wang Peiyuan, Wang Bin, Liu Baolin
School of Computer Science and Technology, Tianjin Key Laboratory of Cognitive Computing and Applications, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China.
Medical Imaging Research Institute, Binzhou Medical University, Yantai, China.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2018 Jan 10;11:653. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2017.00653. eCollection 2017.
Our human brain can rapidly and effortlessly perceive a person's emotional state by integrating the isolated emotional faces and bodies into a whole. Behavioral studies have suggested that the human brain encodes whole persons in a holistic rather than part-based manner. Neuroimaging studies have also shown that body-selective areas prefer whole persons to the sum of their parts. The body-selective areas played a crucial role in representing the relationships between emotions expressed by different parts. However, it remains unclear in which regions the perception of whole persons is represented by a combination of faces and bodies, and to what extent the combination can be influenced by the whole person's emotions. In the present study, functional magnetic resonance imaging data were collected when participants performed an emotion distinction task. Multi-voxel pattern analysis was conducted to examine how the whole person-evoked responses were associated with the face- and body-evoked responses in several specific brain areas. We found that in the extrastriate body area (EBA), the whole person patterns were most closely correlated with weighted sums of face and body patterns, using different weights for happy expressions but equal weights for angry and fearful ones. These results were unique for the EBA. Our findings tentatively support the idea that the whole person patterns are represented in a part-based manner in the EBA, and modulated by emotions. These data will further our understanding of the neural mechanism underlying perceiving emotional persons.
我们的人类大脑能够通过将孤立的情感面孔和身体整合为一个整体，快速且毫不费力地感知一个人的情绪状态。行为研究表明，人类大脑以整体而非基于部分的方式对完整的人进行编码。神经影像学研究也表明，身体选择性区域更倾向于完整的人而非其各个部分的总和。身体选择性区域在表征不同部分所表达的情绪之间的关系中起着关键作用。然而，尚不清楚在哪些区域中，对完整的人的感知是由面孔和身体的组合来表征的，以及这种组合在多大程度上会受到整个人的情绪的影响。在本研究中，当参与者执行情绪区分任务时收集了功能磁共振成像数据。进行了多体素模式分析，以检查在几个特定脑区中，对完整的人的诱发反应如何与对面孔和身体的诱发反应相关联。我们发现，在纹外身体区域（EBA），完整的人的模式与面孔和身体模式的加权总和最密切相关，对于高兴表情使用不同权重，而对于愤怒和恐惧表情使用相等权重。这些结果在EBA中是独特的。我们的发现初步支持了这样一种观点，即完整的人的模式在EBA中以基于部分的方式被表征，并受情绪调节。这些数据将增进我们对感知有情绪的人的神经机制的理解。
