Investigating Emotional Top Down Modulation of Ambiguous Faces by Single Pulse TMS on Early Visual Cortices

Top-down processing is a mechanism in which memory, context and expectation are used to perceive stimuli. For this study we investigated how emotion content, induced by music mood, influences perception of happy and sad emoticons. Using single pulse TMS we stimulated right occipital face area (rOFA), primary visual cortex (V1) and vertex while subjects performed a face-detection task and listened to happy and sad music. At baseline, incongruent audio-visual pairings decreased performance, demonstrating dependence of emotion while perceiving ambiguous faces. However, performance of face identification decreased during rOFA stimulation regardless of emotional content. No effects were found between Cz and V1 stimulation. These results suggest that while rOFA is important for processing faces regardless of emotion, V1 stimulation had no effect. Our findings suggest that early visual cortex activity may not integrate emotional auditory information with visual information during emotion top-down modulation of faces.