Emotion as Visual Schema

The fact that emotion category units of EmoNet were best characterized by activity spanning visual cortex 389 (i.e., the occipital lobe) sheds light on the nature of emotion representation in the brain, providing evidence for a 390 distributed rather than a modular neural basis of emotion schemas. Activation of schemas in visual cortex offers a 391 rapid, possibly automatic way of triggering downstream emotional responses in the absence of deliberative or top392 down conceptual processes. By harnessing the parallel and distributed architecture of the visual system, these 393 representations could be refined through experience. Information from downstream systems via feedback 394 projections from ventromedial prefrontal cortex or the amygdala (Pessoa and Adolphs 2010, Kravitz, Saleem et 395 al. 2013) could update visual emotion schemas through learning (Serences 2008, Dunsmoor, Kragel et al. 2014). 396 Thus, emotion-related activity in visual cortex is most likely not a purely bottom-up response to stimuli or a top397 down interpretation of them, but is at the interface of sensory representations of the environment and prior 398 knowledge about potential outcomes. Future work integrating computational models with recurrent feedback 399 (e.g., Nayebi, Bear et al. 2018) and brain responses to emotional images will be necessary to understand the 400 convergence of bottom-up and top-down signals.