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Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception

View ORCID ProfileBeau Sievers, Carolyn Parkinson, Peter J. Kohler, James M. Hughes, Sergey V. Fogelson, Thalia Wheatley
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/254961
Beau Sievers
1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
6Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA
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  • ORCID record for Beau Sievers
Carolyn Parkinson
2Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
3Brain Research Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
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Peter J. Kohler
4Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
5Centre for Vision Research, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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James M. Hughes
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Sergey V. Fogelson
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Thalia Wheatley
6Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA
7Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
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  • For correspondence: thalia.p.wheatley@dartmouth.edu
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Summary

Emotionally expressive music and dance occur together across the world. This may be because features shared across the senses are represented the same way even in different sensory brain areas, putting music and movement in directly comparable terms. These shared representations may arise from a general need to identify environmentally relevant combinations of sensory features, particularly those that communicate emotion. To test the hypothesis that visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure, we created music and animation stimuli with crossmodally matched features expressing a range of emotions. Participants confirmed that each emotion corresponded to a set of features shared across music and movement. A subset of participants viewed both music and animation during brain scanning, revealing that representations in auditory and visual brain areas were similar to one another. This shared representation captured not only simple stimulus features, but also combinations of features associated with emotion judgments. The posterior superior temporal cortex represented both music and movement using this same structure, suggesting supramodal abstraction of sensory content. Further exploratory analysis revealed that early visual cortex used this shared representational structure even when stimuli were presented auditorily. We propose that crossmodally shared representations support mutually reinforcing dynamics across auditory and visual brain areas, facilitating crossmodal comparison. These shared representations may help explain why emotions are so readily perceived and why some dynamic emotional expressions can generalize across cultural contexts.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • Improved analyses, expanded literature review and discussion.

  • https://osf.io/kvbqm/

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted September 13, 2021.
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Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception
Beau Sievers, Carolyn Parkinson, Peter J. Kohler, James M. Hughes, Sergey V. Fogelson, Thalia Wheatley
bioRxiv 254961; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/254961
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Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception
Beau Sievers, Carolyn Parkinson, Peter J. Kohler, James M. Hughes, Sergey V. Fogelson, Thalia Wheatley
bioRxiv 254961; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/254961

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