From Motion to Emotion: Visual Pathways and Potential Interconnections

The two visual pathway description of Ungerleider and Mishkin changed the course of late 20th century systems and cognitive neuroscience. Here, I try to reexamine our laboratory's work through the lens of the Pitcher and Ungerleider new third visual pathway. I also briefly review the literature related to brain responses to static and dynamic visual displays, visual stimulation involving multiple individuals, and compare existing models of social information processing for the face and body. In this context, I examine how the posterior STS might generate unique social information relative to other brain regions that also respond to social stimuli. I discuss some of the existing challenges we face with assessing how information flow progresses between structures in the proposed functional pathways and how some stimulus types and experimental designs may have complicated our data interpretation and model generation. I also note a series of outstanding questions for the field. Finally, I examine the idea of a potential expansion of the third visual pathway, to include aspects of previously proposed "lateral" visual pathways. Doing this would yield a more general entity for processing motion/action (i.e., "[inter]action") that deals with interactions between people, as well as people and objects. In this framework, a brief discussion of potential hemispheric biases for function, and different forms of neuropsychological impairments created by focal lesions in the posterior brain is highlighted to help situate various brain regions into an expanded [inter]action pathway.