Abstract
Previous work suggested that emotion affect both basic perceptions and high-level cognition. At the perceptual level, positive mood has been shown to enhance broad, holistic, and inclusive processes, whereas negative mood has been associated with narrow and sharpened perceptual selection (Derryberry & Tucker, 1994; Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005; Uddenberg & Shim, 2015). However, it remains unclear whether and how the broadening or narrowing effect of emotion can affect the neural representations of visual features. Here, we examined whether positive and negative affective states modulate feature-selective responses in early and high-level visual areas. Participants first listened to music clips to elicit positive (happy), negative (sad), or neutral emotions. After mood induction, using fMRI and an inverted encoding model (Brouwer & Heeger, 2009), population-level color-selective responses were examined in the primary visual cortex (V1) and extrastriate areas (V2, V3, V4v, and VO) while participants performed a color categorization task on a spiral with one of the 12 colors chosen from the DKL color space. Consistent with previous findings (Isen & Daubman, 1984), the number of categories into which participants grouped the colors was lower in the happy condition compared to the sad and neutral conditions, reflecting inclusive processes induced by the positive affect. While the influence of the positive affect was identified behaviorally, the color-selective responses in V4 were degraded in the sad condition compared to the neutral condition, indicating that the negative affect can have an influence on the selectivity of color responses. This result suggests that emotion can affect neural representations of basic visual features and that the negative affect in particular may modulate feature selectivity.
Acknowledgement: IBS-R015-D1