A Study On Emotion Recognition Based On Activity Patterns Evoked By Face, Body And Whole Person

Humans can rapidly and effortlessly obtain a whole persons' emotion perception by integrating isolated emotional faces and bodies.Behavioral studies suggested that brain encoded whole persons as a holistic person rather than in a part-based manner.Some functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI)researches also manifested body-selective areas preferred whole persons over their sum of parts.There is still no clear evidence whether the whole persons were perceived as the combination of faces and bodies in human brains,nor to which extent emotion could influence the combination.In the present study,participants viewed faces,bodies and whole persons,while performing an emotion distinction task.Univariate analysis and multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA)were conducted to examine how whole person-evoked response patterns related to face-and body-evoked response patterns in all key brain areas.We found that in extrastriate body area(EBA),whole person patterns were most closely correlated with the sum of face and patterns at the different weights for happy emotion,while the same weights for angry and fearful emotion.In addition,the weighted mean pattern successfully decoded the emotions expressed by the whole person pattern.These results were unique for EBA.Finally,EBA possessed the best performance for emotion and category classification as well.These results dedicated to the idea that the whole person perception in a part-based manner occurred most probably in EBA,and was modulated by emotion.It is profound to further our understanding of the neural mechanism in perceiving emotional persons.