Distinct Representations of Irrelevant Emotional Information in the Visual Network Are Associated With...

Adolescence is a period of heightened risk for psychopathology. Recent studies suggest shared neural correlates across psychiatric disorders in brain networks involved in emotional and cognitive processes. However, the visual network-crucial for extracting and processing emotional information-has received less attention. Here, using a transdiagnostic approach, we focus on the visual network to investigate how youth with psychopathology represent and differentiate between emotional face categories during a cognitively demanding task, for which emotional content is irrelevant.

We used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, Release 4.0 (ages 11-12 years; N = 4952 after quality control). Symptoms of psychopathology were based on the Child Behavior Checklist. Participants performed an emotional n-back task in the scanner. Representational similarity analysis was performed to examine dissimilarities in neural representations between emotional categories in functional brain networks.

Greater dissimilarity in neural representations between emotional categories in the visual network was associated with worse cognitive performance and more psychopathology for the high memory load condition (p < .001). This association was evident early in visual processing, as demonstrated in the primary visual cortex (p < .001), and predicted symptoms a year later.

Using a transdiagnostic approach, we showed that the distinctiveness in neural representations of task-irrelevant emotional information in the visual cortex is positively correlated with psychopathology. Together, our findings suggest the importance of the visual network and early visual areas in understanding neural mechanisms of emotional processing in youth with psychopathology.