Abstract
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.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Doris J. Kistler, Anna Bechner, and Professor Seth Pollak for providing the set of stimuli. This research project was supported by Regione Emilia-Romagna (Delibera di Giunta Regionale n.1786/2012), Programma di Ricerca Regione-Università 2010–2012, and by MiUR Prin 2010–2011 (Protocollo 2010XPMFW4_002) to L.C. We are grateful to Francesca Nardi and Annalisa Mela for assistance with data collection, and to Michela Balconi for first comments on the draft.
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All the experimental procedures were approved by the “Comitato Etico Unico della Provincia di Ferrara”, the local Ethics Committee.
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Mele, S., Ghirardi, V. & Craighero, L. Facial expressions as a model to test the role of the sensorimotor system in the visual perception of the actions. Exp Brain Res 235, 3771–3783 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-017-5097-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-017-5097-y