Open AccessSpatiotemporal dynamics in human visual cortex rapidly encode the emotional content of faces
Author(s) -
Dima Diana C.,
Perry Gavin,
Messaritaki Eirini,
Zhang Jiaxiang,
Singh Krish D.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
human brain mapping
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.005
H-Index - 191
eISSN - 1097-0193
pISSN - 1065-9471
DOI - 10.1002/hbm.24226
Subject(s) - magnetoencephalography , psychology , stimulus (psychology) , cognitive psychology , visual cortex , encode , neuroscience , electroencephalography , biology , biochemistry , gene
Recognizing emotion in faces is important in human interaction and survival, yet existing studies do not paint a consistent picture of the neural representation supporting this task. To address this, we collected magnetoencephalography (MEG) data while participants passively viewed happy, angry and neutral faces. Using time‐resolved decoding of sensor‐level data, we show that responses to angry faces can be discriminated from happy and neutral faces as early as 90 ms after stimulus onset and only 10 ms later than faces can be discriminated from scrambled stimuli, even in the absence of differences in evoked responses. Time‐resolved relevance patterns in source space track expression‐related information from the visual cortex (100 ms) to higher‐level temporal and frontal areas (200–500 ms). Together, our results point to a system optimised for rapid processing of emotional faces and preferentially tuned to threat, consistent with the important evolutionary role that such a system must have played in the development of human social interactions.