Neural Mechanism of Affective Perception: Evidence from Phase and Causality Analysis in the Cerebral Cortex

Responses of functional brain networks in micro-expressions: An EEG study

Micro-expressions (MEs) can reflect an individual’s subjective emotions and true mental state, and they are widely used in the fields of mental health, justice, law enforcement, intelligence, and security. However, one of the major challenges of working with MEs is that their neural mechanism is not entirely understood. To the best of our knowledge, the present study is the first to use electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate the reorganizations of functional brain networks involved in MEs. We aimed to reveal the underlying neural mechanisms that can provide electrophysiological indicators for ME recognition. A real-time supervision and emotional expression suppression experimental paradigm was designed to collect video and EEG data of MEs and no expressions (NEs) of 70 participants expressing positive emotions. Based on the graph theory, we analyzed the efficiency of functional brain network at the scalp level on both macro and micro scales. The results revealed that in the presence of MEs compared with NEs, the participants exhibited higher global efficiency and nodal efficiency in the frontal, occipital, and temporal regions. Additionally, using the random forest algorithm to select a subset of functional connectivity features as input, the support vector machine classifier achieved a classification accuracy for MEs and NEs of 0.81, with an area under the curve of 0.85. This finding demonstrates the possibility of using EEG to recognize MEs, with a wide range of application scenarios, such as persons wearing face masks or patients with expression disorders.

Electrophysiological evidence for inhibition hypothesis of micro-expressions based on tensor component analysis and Physarum network algorithm

The inhibition hypothesis advocated by Ekman (1985) states when an emotion is concealed or masked, the true emotion is manifested as a micro-expression (ME) which is a fleeting expression lasting for 40 to 500 ms. However, research about the inhibition hypothesis of ME from the perspective of electrophysiology is lacking. Here, we report the electrophysiological evidence obtained from an electroencephalography (EEG) data analysis method. Specifically, we designed an ME elicitation paradigm to collect data of MEs of positive emotions and EEG from 70 subjects, and proposed a method based on tensor component analysis (TCA) combined with the Physarum network (PN) algorithm to characterize the spatial, temporal, and spectral signatures of dynamic EEG data of MEs. The proposed TCA-PN methods revealed two pathways involving dorsal and ventral streams in functional brain networks of MEs, which reflected the inhibition processing and emotion arousal of MEs. The results provide evidence for the inhibition hypothesis from an electrophysiological standpoint, which allows us to better understand the neural mechanism of MEs.

EEG emotion recognition based on enhanced SPD matrix and manifold dimensionality reduction

Recently, Riemannian geometry-based pattern recognition has been widely employed to brain computer interface (BCI) researches, providing new idea for emotion recognition based on electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Although the symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrix manifold constructed from the traditional covariance matrix contains large amount of spatial information, these methods do not perform well to classify and recognize emotions, and the high dimensionality problem still unsolved. Therefore, this paper proposes a new strategy for EEG emotion recognition utilizing Riemannian geometry with the aim of achieving better classification performance. The emotional EEG signals of 32 healthy subjects were from an open-source dataset (DEAP). The wavelet packets were first applied to extract the time-frequency features of the EEG signals, and then the features were used to construct the enhanced SPD matrix. A supervised dimensionality reduction algorithm was then designed on the Riemannian manifold to reduce the high dimensionality of the SPD matrices, gather samples of the same labels together, and separate samples of different labels as much as possible. Finally, the samples were mapped to the tangent space, and the K-nearest neighbors (KNN), Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) method were employed for classification. The proposed method achieved an average accuracy of 91.86%, 91.84% on the valence and arousal recognition tasks. Furthermore, we also obtained the superior accuracy of 86.71% on the four-class recognition task, demonstrated the superiority over state-of-the-art emotion recognition methods.

Reconfiguration of Cortical Brain Network from Searching to Spotting for Dynamic Visual Targets

BACKGROUND

Detecting dynamic targets from complex visual scenes is an important problem in real world. However, the cognitive mechanism accounting for dynamic visual target detection remains unclear.

NEW METHOD

Herein, we aim to explore the cognitive process of dynamic visual target detection from searching to spotting and provide more concrete evidence for cognitive studies related to target detection. Cortical source responses with high spatiotemporal resolution were reconstructed from scalp EEG signals. Then, time-varying cortical networks were built using adaptive directed transfer function to explore the cognitive processes while detecting the dynamic visual target.

RESULTS

The experimental results demonstrated that the dynamic visual target detection enhanced the activation in both the visual and attention networks. Specially, the information flow from the middle occipital gyrus (MOG) mainly contributed to the position function, whereas the activation of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) reflected spatial attention maintenance.

CONCLUSION

The left "frontal-central-parietal" network played as a leading information source in dynamic target detection tasks. These findings provide new insights into cognitive processes of dynamic visual target detection.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The datasets in this study are available on request to the corresponding author.