Coimbra Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Translational Research, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal.
Institute of Nuclear Sciences Applied to Health (ICNAS), University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal.
J Vis. 2020 Aug 3;20(8):19. doi: 10.1167/jov.20.8.19.
The human visual system is constantly processing multiple and often conflicting sensory cues to make perceptual decisions. Given the nonlinear nature of emotion recognition, this often leads to different percepts of the same physical facial expression. Moreover, the state of the emotion recognition system might depend on the trajectory of temporal context, potentially leading to a phenomenon known as perceptual hysteresis. Here, we aimed to explore temporal context-related mechanisms underlying perceptual hysteresis during emotion recognition. We hypothesized that dependence on recent perceptual experience might reveal important clues about the role of short-term memory on the perception of emotional stimuli. Behavioral data were acquired using reality-based, changing emotion expressions morphed from a source to a target emotion with different valences, always passing through a neutral expression. Participants identified the onset and offset of what they perceived as the neutral expression interval. Our results showed that current perception of emotional expression is affected by recent temporal context, thus revealing perceptual hysteresis. We also found a relation between recent perceptual history effects and stimulus emotional Content: The positive valence of the stimulus emotional content appeared to abolish perceptual history effects, whereas negatively loaded stimuli induced clear short-term memory effects and positive hysteresis. Our findings show direct competition between recent perceptual experience and stimulus emotional content during decision making, which affects the formation of current percepts in emotion recognition.
人类视觉系统不断处理多种且经常相互冲突的感觉提示，以做出感知决策。鉴于情绪识别的非线性性质，这通常会导致对同一物理面部表情的不同感知。此外，情绪识别系统的状态可能取决于时间上下文的轨迹，这可能导致一种称为感知滞后的现象。在这里，我们旨在探索情绪识别过程中感知滞后的时间上下文相关机制。我们假设对近期感知经验的依赖可能揭示了短期记忆在情绪刺激感知中的作用的重要线索。使用基于现实的行为数据，通过不同效价的源表情到目标表情的渐变来改变表情，表情总是经过中性表情。参与者识别他们感知到的中性表情间隔的开始和结束。我们的结果表明，当前对情绪表达的感知受到最近时间上下文的影响，从而揭示了感知滞后。我们还发现了近期感知历史效应与刺激情绪内容之间的关系：刺激情绪内容的正效价似乎消除了感知历史效应，而带有负效价的刺激则引起了明显的短期记忆效应和正滞后。我们的发现表明，在决策过程中，近期感知经验和刺激情绪内容之间存在直接竞争，这会影响情绪识别中当前感知的形成。
