Multiple synergistic effects of emotion and memory on proactive processes leading to scene recognition

Vestibular mapping of the naturalistic head-centered motion spectrum

BACKGROUND

Naturalistic head accelerations can be used to elicit vestibular evoked potentials (VestEPs). These potentials allow for analysis of cortical vestibular processing and its multi-sensory integration with a high temporal resolution.

METHODS

We report the results of two experiments in which we compared the differential VestEPs elicited by randomized translations, rotations, and tilts in healthy subjects on a motion platform.

RESULTS

An event-related potential (ERP) analysis revealed that established VestEPs were verifiable in all three acceleration domains (translations, rotations, tilts). A further analysis of the VestEPs showed a significant correlation between rotation axes (yaw, pitch, roll) and the amplitude of the evoked potentials. We found increased amplitudes for rotations in the roll compared to the pitch and yaw plane. A distributed source localization analysis showed that the activity in the cingulate sulcus visual (CSv) area best explained direction-dependent amplitude modulations of the VestEPs, but that the same cortical network (posterior insular cortex, CSv) is involved in processing vestibular information, regardless of the motion direction.

CONCLUSION

The results provide evidence for an anisotropic, direction-dependent processing of vestibular input by cortical structures. The data also suggest that area CSv plays an integral role in ego-motion perception and interpretation of spatial features such as acceleration direction and intensity.

Rapid Extraction of Emotion Regularities from Complex Scenes in the Human Brain

Adaptive behavior requires the rapid extraction of behaviorally relevant information in the environment, with particular emphasis on emotional cues. However, the speed of emotional feature extraction from complex visual environments is largely undetermined. Here we use objective electrophysiological recordings in combination with frequency tagging to demonstrate that the extraction of emotional information from neutral, pleasant, or unpleasant naturalistic scenes can be completed at a presentation speed of 167 ms (i.e., 6 Hz) under high perceptual load. Emotional compared to neutral pictures evoked enhanced electrophysiological responses with distinct topographical activation patterns originating from different neural sources. Cortical facilitation in early visual cortex was also more pronounced for scenes with pleasant compared to unpleasant or neutral content, suggesting a positivity offset mechanism dominating under conditions of rapid scene processing. These results significantly advance our knowledge of complex scene processing in demonstrating rapid integrative content identification, particularly for emotional cues relevant for adaptive behavior in complex environments.