CANCELLED Hans Op de Beeck, KUL: "From pictures to feelings: The neural basis of emotional processing of complex social scenes"

Monday 25 Nov 2024, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Brussels

B-30/0-000 - Big meeting room (CRC)

Abstract: Humans can evaluate the emotional meaning of complex social interactions in real-life settings, but it is unclear how this assessment is achieved. Previous evidence from the human brain and AI models pointed to visual regions as an important location for processing emotional valence, but this conclusion may not generalize to complex scenes involving social interactions. To dissociate the different levels of processing, we designed an image set with complex social scene images that dissociates emotional valence from visual characteristics, objects, and scene settings. We recorded neural responses for these stimuli using fMRI and EEG. We found that visual processing and simple AI models capture the basic emotional associations of objects and scenes. Yet, higher levels of processing are needed, in AI models and distributed across human association cortex, to robustly capture the valence of social scenes when it is at odds with more basic properties of images. As a result, human and AI judgments of image valence align only for a multimodal AI model.

 

Hans Op de Beeck is a professor in Brain and Cognition University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium. He is an expert on the neuroscience of visual intelligence and learning, combining behavioural methods with human brain imaging (fMRI & EEG) and computational modelling.