“Top-down influences on the perception of emotional stimuli” (also available as PDF)
The ability to quickly and accurately perceive external emotional stimuli — events in the environment that evoke changes in feelings, physiology and behaviour — is vital for adaptive social interactions and effective decision making in everyday life.
Contemporary theories of emotional perception emphasize the influence of top-down information (such as prior knowledge and context) in shaping the perception of emotional stimuli.
However, experimental research has mainly focused on the automatic, bottom-up aspects that are driven by the stimuli themselves (such as salience).
Research in the adjacent field of visual perception has used behavioural, computational and neuroimaging techniques to reveal how prior knowledge aids perception in a top-down manner.
In this Review, we explore studies that leverage similar methods to demonstrate how top-down influences — including social and emotional attention, expectations and context — shape the perception of emotional stimuli.
In doing so, we aim to promote the development of comprehensive models that incorporate top-down factors with bottom-up factors to explain the perception of emotional stimuli.
a, Signal-detection models show the distributions of sensory evidence for an emotional stimulus (red curves) and a neutral stimulus (blue curves), with the lighter dotted lines showing the distributions in the absence of a top-down influence. Top-down influences such as anticipatory attention to emotional stimuli can reduce the overlap between the distributions (solid curves), indicating heightened perceptual sensitivity. Top-down expectation of emotional stimuli shifts the unbiased decision criterion (dashed vertical line) towards the right, resulting in more liberal endorsement of emotional stimuli (solid vertical line).
b, In drift-diffusion models, the decision-maker accumulates sensory evidence from the starting point at a certain drift rate until they arrive at a decision threshold for an emotional response (red lines) or neutral response (blue lines). In the absence of top-down influence, the starting point is close to the midpoint and the drift rate is similar for emotional and neutral stimuli (dashed lines). In the presence of top-down attention to emotional stimuli (solid lines), the starting point of evidence accumulation shifts towards the emotional response and there is more efficient evidence accumulation for emotional stimuli.
c, In the hierarchical predictive coding framework, perception of emotional stimuli depends on interactions between bottom-up feedforward connections that convey precision-weighted prediction errors (orange) and top-down feedback connections that carry precision-weighted predictions (purple). Predictions and prediction errors for emotional stimuli might have higher
precision than they do for neutral stimuli, which enhances their detectability.
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