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Related Experiment Video

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Decoding Natural Behavior from Neuroethological Embedding

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Published on: October 3, 2025

Decoding the difference between explicit and implicit body expression representation in high level visual, prefrontal

Giuseppe Marrazzo¹, Maarten J Vaessen¹, Beatrice de Gelder²

¹Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Limburg 6200 MD, Maastricht, the Netherlands.

|September 3, 2021

Summary

Task demands significantly shape brain activity for visual category representation. Explicit emotion recognition tasks, compared to implicit shape tasks, alter how the brain processes body expressions, highlighting task importance.

Keywords:

Body Categories Dorsal-ventral stream Emotion Representational similarity analysis fMRI

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Psychology
Visual Perception

Background:

Understanding visual object category representation in the brain is evolving, with ongoing debate between category-based and network-inspired models.
Key underexplored areas include how attributes like emotional expression influence category representation and task sensitivity of these representations.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the impact of emotional expression on body category representation in the brain.
To determine if this impact varies based on the participant's task demands (explicit emotion vs. implicit shape recognition).

Main Methods:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) responses.
Participants viewed whole body expressions under two conditions: explicit emotion recognition and implicit shape recognition.

Main Results:

Task type was the strongest determinant of brain activity, decodable in the Extrastriate Body Area (EBA), Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex (VLPFC), and Inferior Parietal Lobule (IPL).
Higher brain activity was observed in the VLPFC during the explicit task, and this activity was not emotion-specific.
Explicit recognition of body expressions may strengthen body category representation while suppressing emotion and action-related activity.

Conclusions:

Task demands are crucial in shaping neural representations within high-level visual cortex.
Category attributes, like emotional expression, play a significant role, but their influence is modulated by task context.
Findings emphasize the dynamic nature of visual processing, influenced by both stimulus properties and cognitive goals.