Consistent behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for rapid perceptual discrimination among the six human basic fa
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Consistent behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for rapid perceptual discrimination among the six human basic facial expressions Qiuling Luo 1,2 & Milena Dzhelyova 2
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract The extent to which the six basic human facial expressions perceptually differ from one another remains controversial. For instance, despite the importance of rapidly decoding fearful faces, this expression often is confused with other expressions, such as Surprise in explicit behavioral categorization tasks. We quantified implicit visual discrimination among rapidly presented facial expressions with an oddball periodic visual stimulation approach combined with electroencephalography (EEG), testing for the relationship with behavioral explicit measures of facial emotion discrimination. We report robust facial expression discrimination responses bilaterally over the occipito-temporal cortex for each pairwise expression change. While fearful faces presented as repeated stimuli led to the smallest deviant responses from all other basic expressions, deviant fearful faces were well discriminated overall and to a larger extent than expressions of Sadness and Anger. Expressions of Happiness did not differ quantitatively as much in EEG as for behavioral subjective judgments, suggesting that the clear dissociation between happy and other expressions, typically observed in behavioral studies, reflects higher-order processes. However, this expression differed from all others in terms of scalp topography, pointing to a qualitative rather than quantitative difference. Despite this difference, overall, we report for the first time a tight relationship of the similarity matrices across facial expressions obtained for implicit EEG responses and behavioral explicit measures collected under the same temporal constraints, paving the way for new approaches of understanding facial expression discrimination in developmental, intercultural, and clinical populations. Keywords Facial expressions . Perceptual similarity . EEG . FPVS
Introduction Facial expressions are important communicative cues, guiding behavior and social interactions. To be able to reliably and quickly interpret these signals, humans have evolved complex systems to successfully categorize facial expressions, i.e., visually discriminate among different expressions and generalize these differences across other facial variations, for Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-020-00811-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Milena Dzhelyova [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, China
2
Institut de Recherche en Sciences Psychologiques (IPSY), Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Place du Cardinal Mercier, 10, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
instance, face identity. In humans, since the pioneering work of Ekman and colleagues, six categories of facial expressions (Fear, Anger, Disgust, Happiness, Sadness, Su
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