Representation of affect in sensory cortex

Contemporary neuroscience suggests that perception is perhaps best understood as a dynamically iterative process that does not honor cleanly segregated "bottom-up" or "top-down" streams. We argue that there is substantial empirical support for the idea that affective influences infiltrate the earliest reaches of sensory processing and even that primitive internal affective dimensions (e.g., goodness-to-badness) are represented alongside physical dimensions of the external world.