Nonlinear transduction of emotional facial expression

Katie Gray; Tessa Rosemary Flack; Miaomiao Yu; Freya Lygo; Daniel Hart Baker

doi:10.31234/osf.io/svw8q

Nonlinear transduction of emotional facial expression

Katie Gray, Tessa Rosemary Flack, Miaomiao Yu, Freya Lygo, Daniel Hart Baker

Psychology

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

To create neural representations of external stimuli, the brain performs a number of processing steps that transform its inputs. For fundamental attributes, such as stimulus contrast, this involves one or more nonlinearities that are believed to optimise the neural code to represent features of the natural environment. Here we ask if the same is also true of more complex stimulus dimensions, such as emotional facial expression. We report the results of three experiments combining morphed facial stimuli with electrophysiological and psychophysical methods to measure the function mapping emotional expression intensity to internal response. The results converge on a nonlinearity that accelerates over weak expressions, and then becomes shallower for stronger expressions, similar to the situation for lower level stimulus properties. We further demonstrate that the nonlinearity is not attributable to the morphing procedure used in stimulus generation.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1-11
Number of pages	12
Journal	Vision Research
Volume	170
Early online date	24 Mar 2020
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/svw8q https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2020.03.004
Publication status	Published - May 2020

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© 2020 Elsevier Ltd.
Accepted author manuscript, 1.38 MBLicence: CC BY-NC-ND

Nonlinear transduction of emotional facial expression - data and scripts
Baker, D. H. (Creator) & Gray, K. (Creator), OSF, 11 Apr 2019
DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/8MS4Y
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AU - Flack, Tessa Rosemary

AU - Yu, Miaomiao

AU - Lygo, Freya

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AB - To create neural representations of external stimuli, the brain performs a number of processing steps that transform its inputs. For fundamental attributes, such as stimulus contrast, this involves one or more nonlinearities that are believed to optimise the neural code to represent features of the natural environment. Here we ask if the same is also true of more complex stimulus dimensions, such as emotional facial expression. We report the results of three experiments combining morphed facial stimuli with electrophysiological and psychophysical methods to measure the function mapping emotional expression intensity to internal response. The results converge on a nonlinearity that accelerates over weak expressions, and then becomes shallower for stronger expressions, similar to the situation for lower level stimulus properties. We further demonstrate that the nonlinearity is not attributable to the morphing procedure used in stimulus generation.

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Nonlinear transduction of emotional facial expression

Abstract

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Nonlinear transduction of emotional facial expression - data and scripts

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