Facial expressions as a model to test the role of the sensorimotor system in the visual perception of the actions

• Published in: Experimental brain research Vol. 235; no. 12; pp. 3771 - 3783
• Main Authors: Mele, Sonia, Ghirardi, Valentina, Craighero, Laila
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.12.2017; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adult; Analysis; Analysis of Variance; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedicine; Brain Mapping; Cognition & reasoning; Discrimination (Psychology) - physiology; Emotions; Emotions - physiology; Facial Expression; Female; Humans; Labeling; Male; Movement - physiology; Neurology; Neurosciences; Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology; Perceptual-motor processes; Posture; Psychological aspects; Psychological research; Research Article; Sensorimotor system; Skin; Speech; Tongue; Visual discrimination; Visual perception; Visual Perception - physiology; Young Adult; Action observation; Embodied cognition; Intransitive actions; Facial expressions; Sensorimotor system; Postural manipulation
• ISSN: 0014-4819; 1432-1106; 1432-1106
• DOI: 10.1007/s00221-017-5097-y

A long-term debate concerns whether the sensorimotor coding carried out during transitive actions observation reflects the low-level movement implementation details or the movement goals. On the contrary, phonemes and emotional facial expressions are intransitive actions that do not fall into this debate. The investigation of phonemes discrimination has proven to be a good model to demonstrate that the sensorimotor system plays a role in understanding actions acoustically presented. In the present study, we adapted the experimental paradigms already used in phonemes discrimination during face posture manipulation, to the discrimination of emotional facial expressions. We submitted participants to a lower or to an upper face posture manipulation during the execution of a four alternative labelling task of pictures randomly taken from four morphed continua between two emotional facial expressions. The results showed that the implementation of low-level movement details influence the discrimination of ambiguous facial expressions differing for a specific involvement of those movement details. These findings indicate that facial expressions discrimination is a good model to test the role of the sensorimotor system in the perception of actions visually presented.