Emotional learning promotes perceptual predictions by remodeling stimulus representation in visual cortex.

ABSTRACT: Emotions exert powerful effects on perception and memory, notably by modulating activity in sensory cortices so as to capture attention. Here, we examine whether emotional significance acquired by a visual stimulus can also change its cortical representation by linking neuronal populations coding for different memorized versions of the same stimulus, a mechanism that would facilitate recognition across different appearances. Using fMRI, we show that after pairing a given face with threat through conditioning, viewing this face activates the representation of another viewpoint of the same person, which itself was never conditioned, leading to robust repetition-priming across viewpoints in the ventral visual stream (including medial fusiform, lateral occipital, and anterior temporal cortex).

SUBMITTER: Meaux E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6856165 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature