Centro studi e ricerche in Neuroscienze Cognitive, Dipartimento di Psicologia "Renzo Canestrari", Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Cesena Campus, Cesena, Italy.
Neuroscience Area, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy.
Nat Commun. 2023 Sep 22;14(1):5720. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-41058-3.
The posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) is a critical node in a network specialized for perceiving emotional facial expressions that is reciprocally connected with early visual cortices (V1/V2). Current models of perceptual decision-making increasingly assign relevance to recursive processing for visual recognition. However, it is unknown whether inducing plasticity into reentrant connections from pSTS to V1/V2 impacts emotion perception. Using a combination of electrophysiological and neurostimulation methods, we demonstrate that strengthening the connectivity from pSTS to V1/V2 selectively increases the ability to perceive facial expressions associated with emotions. This behavior is associated with increased electrophysiological activity in both these brain regions, particularly in V1/V2, and depends on specific temporal parameters of stimulation that follow Hebbian principles. Therefore, we provide evidence that pSTS-to-V1/V2 back-projections are instrumental to perception of emotion from facial stimuli and functionally malleable via manipulation of associative plasticity.
后上颞回（pSTS）是专门用于感知情绪面部表情的网络中的一个关键节点，与早期视觉皮层（V1/V2）相互连接。目前的感知决策模型越来越重视视觉识别的递归处理。然而，尚不清楚是否诱导 pSTS 到 V1/V2 的折返连接的可塑性会影响情绪感知。我们使用电生理和神经刺激方法的组合证明，增强来自 pSTS 到 V1/V2 的连接选择性地提高了感知与情绪相关的面部表情的能力。这种行为与这两个大脑区域的电生理活动增加有关，特别是在 V1/V2 中，并且取决于遵循赫布原则的刺激的特定时间参数。因此，我们提供的证据表明，pSTS 到 V1/V2 的后向投射对于从面部刺激中感知情绪是必不可少的，并且可以通过操纵联想可塑性来进行功能上的改变。
