中国科学院行为科学重点实验室知识库

Emotion perception interacts with how we think and speak, including our concept of emotions. Body expression is an important way of emotion communication, but it is unknown whether and how its perception is modulated by conceptual knowledge. In this study, we employed representational similarity analysis and conducted three experiments combining semantic similarity, mouse-tracking task, and one-back behavioral task with electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques, the results of which show that conceptual knowledge predicted the perceptual representation of body expressions. Further, this prediction effect occurred at approximately 170 ms post-stimulus. The neural encoding of body expressions in the fusiform gyrus and lingual gyrus was impacted by emotion concept knowledge. Taken together, our results indicate that conceptual knowledge of emotion categories shapes the configural representation of body expressions in the ventral visual cortex, which offers compelling evidence for the constructed emotion theory. We used representational similarity analysis to reveal the relationship between conceptual knowledge of emotion and the perception of body expressions. We found that conceptual knowledge significantly predicts the behavioral and neural representation of body expression perception. These results suggest that perceptual representation of body expression can be influenced by conceptual knowledge.image