Integration of identity and emotion information in faces: fMRI evidence

Abstract

Separate neural systems have been implicated in the recognition of facial identity and emotional expression. A growing number of studies now provide evidence against this modular view by demonstrating that integration of identity and emotion information enhances face processing. Yet, the neural mechanisms that shape this integration remain largely unknown. We hypothesize that the presence of both personal and emotional expression target information triggers changes in functional connectivity between frontal and extrastriate areas in the brain. We report and discuss three important findings. First, the presence of target identity and emotional expression in the same face was associated with super capacity and violations of the independent processing of identity and expression cues. Second, activity in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) was associated with the presence of redundant targets and changes in functional connectivity between a particular region of the right OFC (BA11/47) and bilateral visual brain regions (the inferior occipital gyrus (IOG)). Third, these changes in connectivity showed a strong link to behavioural measures of capacity processing. We suggest that the changes in functional connectivity between the right OFC and IOG reduce variability of BOLD responses in the IOG, enhancing integration of identity and emotional expression cues in faces.

Disruption of Inferior Longitudinal Fasciculus Microstructure in Parkinson's Disease: A Systematic Review of Diffusion Tensor Imaging Studies

“…Regarding identification of which specific emotions are selectively or predominantly affected, previous studies have mostly suggested a selective deficit in identifying negative emotions (fear, anger, sadness) ( 122 ). Importantly, emotion recognition relies on numerous neural substrates; In the presence of a target (a facial emotion), the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is activated, and it is, on the other hand, associated with the functional connectivity between a particular region of the right OFC and bilateral visual brain regions [i.e., the inferior occipital gyrus (IOG)] ( 123 ). Therefore, OFC and IOG connections consisting of some structures like ILF are associated with facial emotion recognition.…”

Network-wide abnormalities explain memory variability in hippocampal amnesia

“…Instead of selecting seed/target ROIs or networks in an a priori fashion for our rsFC analyses, we chose to capitalize on the size of our patient cohort and use a PCA-based approach, commonly referred to as ‘connectome-MVPA’ (‘multivariate pattern analysis’) [e.g. (Arnold Anteraper et al, 2019; Flodin et al, 2016; Kazumata et al, 2017; Thompson et al, 2016; Whitfield-Gabrieli et al, 2016; Yankouskaya et al, 2017); implemented in the Conn toolbox (Whitfield-Gabrieli and Nieto-Castanon, 2012) https://sites.google.com/view/conn/measures/networks-voxel-level], in order to identify seed regions for post-hoc seed-to-voxel connectivity analyses in a data-driven fashion. This method has been extensively used to identify the regions in which groups of patients differ significantly from healthy controls with respect to their rsFC with the rest of the brain (e.g.…”

Measuring facial identity and emotion integration using the redundancy gain paradigm

“…In other words, it is possible that the obtained redundancy gains are eliminated when feedback and/or stimulus-response contingencies are implemented in the design with limited stimulus presentation time. However, we believe that this is not a likely scenario as Yankouskaya and her colleagues reported redundancy gains in tasks with and without feedback (Yankouskaya et al, 2012; Yankouskaya et al, 2014a, 2014b; Yankouskaya et al, 2014; Yankouskaya, Stolte, Moradi, Rotshtein, & Humphreys, 2017), and contingencies (Yankouskaya et al, 2012). Nonetheless, the fact remains that we did not directly test the influence of these factors on the redundancy gain, and we are thus cautious to conclude that stimulus presentation time is the key factor to elicit a redundancy gain, and believe that future research should study this issue further (see also Mishler & Neider, 2018).…”