Turano Maria Teresa, Giganti Fiorenza, Gavazzi Gioele, Lamberto Simone, Gronchi Giorgio, Giovannelli Fabio, Peru Andrea, Viggiano Maria Pia
Department of Neuroscience, Psychology, Drug Research & Child's Health, University of Florence, 50100 Florence, Italy.
Fondazione Turano Onlus, 00195 Roma, Italy.
Brain Sci. 2020 Dec 17;10(12):998. doi: 10.3390/brainsci10120998.
The present investigation explores the role of bottom-up and top-down factors in the recognition of emotional facial expressions during binocular rivalry. We manipulated spatial frequencies (SF) and emotive features and asked subjects to indicate whether the emotional or the neutral expression was dominant during binocular rivalry. Controlling the bottom-up saliency with a computational model, physically comparable happy and fearful faces were presented dichoptically with neutral faces. The results showed the dominance of emotional faces over neutral ones. In particular, happy faces were reported more frequently as the first dominant percept even in the presence of coarse information (at a low SF level: 2-6 cycle/degree). Following current theories of emotion processing, the results provide further support for the influence of positive compared to negative meaning on binocular rivalry and, for the first time, showed that individuals perceive the affective quality of happiness even in the absence of details in the visual display. Furthermore, our findings represent an advance in knowledge regarding the association between the high- and low-level mechanisms behind binocular rivalry.
本研究探讨了自下而上和自上而下因素在双眼竞争过程中对情绪化面部表情识别的作用。我们操纵了空间频率（SF）和情感特征，并要求受试者指出在双眼竞争过程中占主导地位的是情绪化表情还是中性表情。通过计算模型控制自下而上的显著性，将与真实快乐和恐惧面孔在物理上相似的面孔与中性面孔进行双眼分视呈现。结果表明，情绪化面孔比中性面孔更具优势。特别是，即使存在粗糙信息（低空间频率水平：2 - 6周/度），快乐面孔也更频繁地被报告为第一个占主导地位的感知。根据当前的情绪加工理论，该结果进一步支持了积极意义相比消极意义对双眼竞争的影响，并且首次表明，即使视觉显示中没有细节，个体也能感知到快乐的情感特质。此外，我们的研究结果代表了在双眼竞争背后高低水平机制之间关联的知识方面的进展。
