Naohisa Miyakawa National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology, Department of Functional Brain Imaging

Subjective value judgments are estimated to be based on the semantic recognition of the object and its interaction with the accompanying emotion generated within. While the higher ventral visual cortex is responsible for understanding the meaning and quality of objects in the external world, emotional experiences such as liking or disliking an object are processed in the limbic system, including the amygdala. How then, does the amygdala cooperate with the ventral visual cortex to achieve deep texture perception, including bad and emotional valence? In this study, we will address this question from two aspects: neural representation of higher visual areas and emotional expression of individuals. We aim to identify the effects of the individual’s subjective emotional expression and emotional experience on the neural representations in the higher ventral visual cortex, which is central to semantic recognition, and to obtain a unified understanding of the neural basis of subjective ‘Shitsukan’ perception. We will develop a facial expression observation paradigm enabling quantitative observation of emotional expression in macaque monkeys, which have a well-developed visual cognitive function like that of humans. This approach will be combined with the ECoG recording method for a wide-range neural activity measurement, and the latest chemogenetics technology for neural activity manipulations.