Shared states: using MVPA to test neural overlap between self-focused emotion imagery and other-focused emotion understanding.

ABSTRACT: The present study tested whether the neural patterns that support imagining 'performing an action', 'feeling a bodily sensation' or 'being in a situation' are directly involved in understanding other people's actions, bodily sensations and situations. Subjects imagined the content of short sentences describing emotional actions, interoceptive sensations and situations (self-focused task), and processed scenes and focused on how the target person was expressing an emotion, what this person was feeling, and why this person was feeling an emotion (other-focused task). Using a linear support vector machine classifier on brain-wide multi-voxel patterns, we accurately decoded each individual class in the self-focused task. When generalizing the classifier from the self-focused task to the other-

SUBMITTER: Oosterwijk S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5490677 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature