Investigating the Neural Basis of Flexible Emotion Perception

项目总结/摘要 对他人情绪的准确感知对于成功的社交互动至关重要，但随着时间的推移， 寿命，并在广泛的疾病中受损，包括焦虑，抑郁，双相情感障碍， 自闭症和精神分裂症。目前的建议建立在PI开发的计算模型上， 假定社会类别的感知，包括情感类别，不仅是由自下而上驱动的， 目标固有的线索（例如，面部特征），但也有自上而下的因素，如 背景和期望。尽管最近的研究已经证明了这种自上而下的因素对 情绪感知，这些自上而下的影响背后的机制，以及它们在 较低层次的视觉表现就不那么清晰了。这项提案的首要目标是利用削减- 边缘神经成像和行为方法来理解面部情绪感知的基本机制， 尤其是期望和背景的影响。功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）将在 与PI开发的创新行为技术结合使用，以实现3个特定目标： (a)研究背景和预期如何系统地偏向面部情绪的视觉表现， 其由OFC和FG相互作用驱动，并取决于IFOF完整性;（B）测试这种自上而下的调制是否 是自动的，并不反映某种形式的知觉后反应偏见;（c）这种机制， 机制是由情感概念知识的个体间差异形成的，它提供了一套 自上而下的对面部情绪感知的期望。这些结果将对未来产生许多影响。 在行为和神经水平上理解灵活的情绪感知，也将有助于告知 各种临床过程涉及情绪感知和社会功能障碍的损害。

Project Summary/Abstract Accurate perception of others' emotion is critical for successful social interaction, yet it diminishes over the lifespan and is impaired across a wide range of disorders, including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, autism, and schizophrenia. The current proposal builds on a computational model developed by the PI, which posits that perceptions of social categories, including emotion categories, are driven not only by bottom-up cues inherent to targets (e.g., facial features) but also top-down factors harbored within perceivers, such as context and expectations. Although recent studies have documented the impact of such top-down factors in emotion perception, the mechanisms underlying these top-down impacts and how “deeply” they manifest at lower levels of visual representation is far less clear. The overarching goal of this proposal is to use cutting- edge neuroimaging and behavioral methods to understand basic mechanisms of facial emotion perception, and particularly the impact by expectations and context. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) will be used in conjunction with an innovative behavioral technique developed by the PI to accomplish 3 specific aims: (a) examine how context and expectations systematically bias the visual representation of a face's emotion, which is driven by OFC‒FG interplay and depends on IFOF integrity; (b) test whether this top-down modulation is automatic and does not reflect some form of post-perceptual response bias; and (c) this mechanism this mechanism is shaped by inter-individual variability in emotion-conceptual knowledge, which provides a set of top-down expectations on the perception of facial emotion. The results will have numerous implications for the understanding of flexible emotion perception at the behavioral and neural levels, and will also help inform a variety of clinical processes involving the impairment of emotion perception and social dysfunction.