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Neural measures of the causal role of observers’ facial mimicry on visual working memory for facial expressions
Simulation models of facial expressions propose that sensorimotor regions may increase the clarity of facial expressions representations in extrastriate areas. We monitored the event-related potential marker of visual working memory (VWM) representations, namely the sustained posterior contralateral...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Oxford University Press
2018
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6277745/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30365020 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsy095 |
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author | Sessa, Paola Schiano Lomoriello, Arianna Luria, Roy |
author_facet | Sessa, Paola Schiano Lomoriello, Arianna Luria, Roy |
author_sort | Sessa, Paola |
collection | PubMed |
description | Simulation models of facial expressions propose that sensorimotor regions may increase the clarity of facial expressions representations in extrastriate areas. We monitored the event-related potential marker of visual working memory (VWM) representations, namely the sustained posterior contralateral negativity (SPCN), also termed contralateral delay activity, while participants performed a change detection task including to-be-memorized faces with different intensities of anger. In one condition participants could freely use their facial mimicry during the encoding/VWM maintenance of the faces while in a different condition participants had their facial mimicry blocked by a gel. Notably, SPCN amplitude was reduced for faces in the blocked mimicry condition when compared to the free mimicry condition. This modulation interacted with the empathy levels of participants such that only participants with medium-high empathy scores showed such reduction of the SPCN amplitude when their mimicry was blocked. The SPCN amplitude was larger for full expressions when compared to neutral and subtle expressions, while subtle expressions elicited lower SPCN amplitudes than neutral faces. These findings provide evidence of a functional link between mimicry and VWM for faces and further shed light on how this memory system may receive feedbacks from sensorimotor regions during the processing of facial expressions. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6277745 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | Oxford University Press |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-62777452018-12-06 Neural measures of the causal role of observers’ facial mimicry on visual working memory for facial expressions Sessa, Paola Schiano Lomoriello, Arianna Luria, Roy Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci Original Article Simulation models of facial expressions propose that sensorimotor regions may increase the clarity of facial expressions representations in extrastriate areas. We monitored the event-related potential marker of visual working memory (VWM) representations, namely the sustained posterior contralateral negativity (SPCN), also termed contralateral delay activity, while participants performed a change detection task including to-be-memorized faces with different intensities of anger. In one condition participants could freely use their facial mimicry during the encoding/VWM maintenance of the faces while in a different condition participants had their facial mimicry blocked by a gel. Notably, SPCN amplitude was reduced for faces in the blocked mimicry condition when compared to the free mimicry condition. This modulation interacted with the empathy levels of participants such that only participants with medium-high empathy scores showed such reduction of the SPCN amplitude when their mimicry was blocked. The SPCN amplitude was larger for full expressions when compared to neutral and subtle expressions, while subtle expressions elicited lower SPCN amplitudes than neutral faces. These findings provide evidence of a functional link between mimicry and VWM for faces and further shed light on how this memory system may receive feedbacks from sensorimotor regions during the processing of facial expressions. Oxford University Press 2018-10-26 /pmc/articles/PMC6277745/ /pubmed/30365020 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsy095 Text en © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com |
spellingShingle | Original Article Sessa, Paola Schiano Lomoriello, Arianna Luria, Roy Neural measures of the causal role of observers’ facial mimicry on visual working memory for facial expressions |
title | Neural measures of the causal role of observers’ facial mimicry on visual working memory for facial expressions |
title_full | Neural measures of the causal role of observers’ facial mimicry on visual working memory for facial expressions |
title_fullStr | Neural measures of the causal role of observers’ facial mimicry on visual working memory for facial expressions |
title_full_unstemmed | Neural measures of the causal role of observers’ facial mimicry on visual working memory for facial expressions |
title_short | Neural measures of the causal role of observers’ facial mimicry on visual working memory for facial expressions |
title_sort | neural measures of the causal role of observers’ facial mimicry on visual working memory for facial expressions |
topic | Original Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6277745/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30365020 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsy095 |
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