Culture influences audiovisual emotion perception in early sensory areas

AbstractEmotion perception from facial and vocal expressions is a multisensory process critical for human social interaction. When asked to judge emotions by attending to either face or voice, the accuracy was higher when facial expressions are congruent with vocal expressions than when they are incongruent. This congruency effect was shown to be affected by cultural background. Here we conducted functional MRI alongside a multisensory emotion perception task involving Japanese and Dutch participants. They were presented with movies in which congruent or incongruent emotions were expressed through faces and voices. The participants were asked to judge the emotion of either the face or the voice. Consistent with previous studies, behavioral results showed an interaction between group and task. fMRI results revealed that during voice-based judgement, congruency effects of the primary visual cortex, by means of the task related activity of congruent stimuli subtracted by that of incongruent stimuli, were more prominent in the Dutch group than in Japanese group. Finally, behavioral and neural congruency effects of the primary visual cortex were positively correlated only in the Dutch group. Taken together, our results show that culture affects the activities of early sensory areas in multisensory perception from facial and vocal expressions.

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Sustained attention-related activity in primary visual cortex

Journal of Vision ◽

10.1167/3.9.179 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 3 (9) ◽

pp. 179-179

Author(s):

M. A Silver ◽

D. Ress ◽

D. J Heeger

Keyword(s):

Visual Cortex ◽

Primary Visual Cortex ◽

Sustained Attention ◽

Related Activity

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The representation and plasticity of body emotion expression

10.31234/osf.io/z9rt7 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Rebecca Watson ◽

Beatrice de Gelder

Keyword(s):

Emotion Perception ◽

Emotion Expression ◽

Whole Body ◽

Social Situations ◽

The Face ◽

Affective Information ◽

The Voice ◽

Body Expression ◽

Expression Perception

Emotions are expressed by the face, the voice and the whole body. Research on the face and the voice has not only demonstrated that emotions are perceived categorically, but that this perception can be manipulated. The purpose of this study was to investigate, via two separate experiments using adaptation and multisensory techniques, whether the perception of body emotion expressions also shows categorical effects and plasticity. We used an approach known from studies investigating both face and voice emotion perception and created novel morphed affective body stimuli, which varied in small incremental steps between emotions. Participants were instructed to perform an emotion categorisation on these morphed bodies after adaptation to bodies conveying different expressions (Experiment 1), or while simultaneously hearing affective voices (Experiment 2). We show that not only is body expression perceived categorically, but that both adaptation to affective body expressions and concurrent presentation of vocal affective information can shift the categorical boundary between body expressions specifically for the angry body expressions. Overall, our findings provide significant new insights into emotional body categorisation, which may prove important into gaining a deeper understanding of body expression perception in everyday social situations.

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Plasticity, and Its Limits, in Adult Human Primary Visual Cortex

Multisensory Research ◽

10.1163/22134808-00002496 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 28 (3-4) ◽

pp. 297-307 ◽

Cited By ~ 15

Author(s):

Koen V. Haak ◽

Antony B. Morland ◽

Koen V. Haak ◽

Antony B. Morland ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Visual Cortex ◽

Primary Visual Cortex ◽

Neural Plasticity ◽

Large Scale ◽

Sampling Bias ◽

Cortical Reorganization ◽

Adult Human ◽

The Face ◽

New Evidence

There is an ongoing debate about whether adult human primary visual cortex (V1) is capable of large-scale cortical reorganization in response to bilateral retinal lesions. Animal models suggest that the visual neural circuitry maintains some plasticity through adulthood, and there are also a few human imaging studies in support this notion. However, the interpretation of these data has been brought into question, because there are factors besides cortical reorganization, such as the presence of sampling bias and/or the unmasking of task-dependent feedback signals from higher level visual areas, that could also explain the results. How reasonable would it be to accept that adult human V1 does not reorganize itself in the face of disease? Here, we discuss new evidence for the hypothesis that adult human V1 is not as capable of reorganization as in animals and juveniles, because in adult humans, cortical reorganization would come with costs that outweigh its benefits. These costs are likely functional and visible in recent experiments on adaptation — a rapid, short-term form of neural plasticity — where they prevent reorganization from being sustained over the long term.

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