Abstract
Our perception of many visual stimuli is accompanied by implicit or explicit assessments of how 'likable' they are. An image of a bowl of cherries, for instance, is attractive while one of moldy bread is not. Here we report results from our electrophysiological studies that were designed to identify the neural correlates of these judgments. Our stimuli depicted food or non-food items with sub-classes of appealing or unappealing exemplars. We sought to determine whether these four classes of stimuli could be distinguished based on the patterns of brain activity they elicited, the consistency of responses across subjects, as well as the time-course of emergence of these responses. Subjects passively viewed 200 visual stimuli (50 from each class) while their brain activity was recorded using magneto-encephalography (MEG). We found compelling differences in brain activity patterns corresponding to the four stimulus classes, with the first distinction emerging as early as 85 ms post stimulus onset. The identification of these neural correlates furthers our understanding of the substrates of affective judgments and has applied implications in the domains of design and evaluation.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013