Task alters body category and emotion representation in high-level visual, prefrontal and inferior parietal cortex
AbstractRecent studies provided an increasingly detailed understanding of how visual objects categories like faces or bodies are represented in the brain. What is less clear is how a given task impacts the representation of the object category and of its attributes. Using (fMRI) we measured BOLD responses while participants viewed whole body expressions and alternatively performed an explicit (emotion) or an implicit (shape) recognition task. Our results based on multivariate methods, show that the type of task is the strongest determinant of brain activity and can be decoded in EBA, VLPFC and IPL. Brain activity was higher for the explicit task condition in the first two areas without evidence of emotion specificity. This pattern indicates that during explicit recognition of the body expression, body category representation may be strengthened, and emotion and action related activity suppressed. Taken together these results indicate that there is important task dependent activity in prefrontal, inferior parietal but also ventral visual areas and point to the importance of the task both when investigating category selectivity and brain correlates of affective processes.