Dissecting abstract, modality-specific and experience-dependent coding of affect in the human brain

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Sensory Processing

Background:

• Emotion and perception are closely linked, with emotions often stemming from sensory information appraisal.
• The neural coding of emotional experiences—whether sensory-specific or abstract—remains an open question.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether the brain encodes emotional instances using a sensory-specific or abstract code.
• To determine how sensory experience and modality influence emotional information processing in the brain.

Main Methods:

• Collected emotion ratings during unimodal and multimodal movie presentations.
• Recorded brain activity in typically developed, congenitally blind, and congenitally deaf participants.
• Analyzed the association between emotional ratings and neural activity across different sensory groups.

Main Results:

• Emotional instances are represented in a widespread neural network, including sensory, prefrontal, and temporal cortices.
• The ventromedial prefrontal cortex shows categorical emotion representation, independent of sensory modality or experience.
• The posterior superior temporal cortex encodes emotional valence using an abstract code.

Conclusions:

• Brain organization of emotional information outside supramodal areas is more influenced by sensory experience than modality.
• Developmental sensory input shapes the functional scaffold for representing emotional states.
• Emotional processing involves abstract representations, modulated by individual sensory experience.