Emotionotopy in the human right temporo-parietal cortex

Giada Lettieri, Giacomo Handjaras, Emiliano Ricciardi, Andrea Leo, Paolo Papale, Monica Betta, Pietro Pietrini and Luca Cecchetti ()
Additional contact information
Giada Lettieri: IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca
Giacomo Handjaras: IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca
Emiliano Ricciardi: IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca
Andrea Leo: IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca
Paolo Papale: IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca
Monica Betta: IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca
Pietro Pietrini: IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca
Luca Cecchetti: IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca

Nature Communications, 2019, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: Abstract Humans use emotions to decipher complex cascades of internal events. However, which mechanisms link descriptions of affective states to brain activity is unclear, with evidence supporting either local or distributed processing. A biologically favorable alternative is provided by the notion of gradient, which postulates the isomorphism between functional representations of stimulus features and cortical distance. Here, we use fMRI activity evoked by an emotionally charged movie and continuous ratings of the perceived emotion intensity to reveal the topographic organization of affective states. Results show that three orthogonal and spatially overlapping gradients encode the polarity, complexity and intensity of emotional experiences in right temporo-parietal territories. The spatial arrangement of these gradients allows the brain to map a variety of affective states within a single patch of cortex. As this organization resembles how sensory regions represent psychophysical properties (e.g., retinotopy), we propose emotionotopy as a principle of emotion coding.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13599-z Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:10:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-019-13599-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-13599-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().