面部表情类别的神经表示反映了概念结构。
The neural representation of facial-emotion categories reflects conceptual structure.
机构信息
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003;
Department of System Neuroscience, National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Okazaki 444-8585, Japan.
出版信息
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 Aug 6;116(32):15861-15870. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1816408116. Epub 2019 Jul 22.
Humans reliably categorize configurations of facial actions into specific emotion categories, leading some to argue that this process is invariant between individuals and cultures. However, growing behavioral evidence suggests that factors such as emotion-concept knowledge may shape the way emotions are visually perceived, leading to variability-rather than universality-in facial-emotion perception. Understanding variability in emotion perception is only emerging, and the neural basis of any impact from the structure of emotion-concept knowledge remains unknown. In a neuroimaging study, we used a representational similarity analysis (RSA) approach to measure the correspondence between the conceptual, perceptual, and neural representational structures of the six emotion categories Anger, Disgust, Fear, Happiness, Sadness, and Surprise. We found that subjects exhibited individual differences in their conceptual structure of emotions, which predicted their own unique perceptual structure. When viewing faces, the representational structure of multivoxel patterns in the right fusiform gyrus was significantly predicted by a subject's unique conceptual structure, even when controlling for potential physical similarity in the faces themselves. Finally, cross-cultural differences in emotion perception were also observed, which could be explained by individual differences in conceptual structure. Our results suggest that the representational structure of emotion expressions in visual face-processing regions may be shaped by idiosyncratic conceptual understanding of emotion categories.
人类能够可靠地将面部动作的组合归类为特定的情绪类别,这使得一些人认为这个过程在个体和文化之间是不变的。然而,越来越多的行为证据表明,情绪概念知识等因素可能会影响人们对情绪的视觉感知方式,从而导致面部情绪感知的可变性,而不是普遍性。对情绪感知的可变性的理解才刚刚开始,而情绪概念知识结构对任何神经基础的影响仍然未知。在一项神经影像学研究中,我们使用了一种表示相似性分析(RSA)的方法来衡量六种情绪类别(愤怒、厌恶、恐惧、幸福、悲伤和惊讶)的概念、感知和神经表示结构之间的对应关系。我们发现,被试在情绪的概念结构上表现出个体差异,这预测了他们自己独特的感知结构。当观看面部时,即使控制面部本身的潜在物理相似性,右梭状回的多体素模式的表示结构也可以被被试独特的概念结构显著预测。最后,还观察到了跨文化的情绪感知差异,这可以用概念结构的个体差异来解释。我们的研究结果表明,视觉面部处理区域中情绪表达的表示结构可能受到对情绪类别独特的概念理解的影响。