The neural representation of body orientation and emotion from biological motion

The perception of human body orientation and emotion in others provides crucial insights into their intentions. While significant research has explored the brain's representation of body orientation and emotional processing, their possible combined representation remains less well understood. In this study, functional magnetic resonance imaging was employed to investigate this issue. Participants were shown point-light displays and tasked with recognizing both body emotion and orientation. The analysis of functional activation revealed that the extrastriate body area encodes emotion, while the precentral gyrus and postcentral gyrus encode body orientation. Additionally, results from multivariate pattern analysis and representational similarity analysis demonstrated that the lingual gyrus, precentral gyrus, and postcentral gyrus play a critical role in processing body orientations, whereas the lingual gyrus and extrastriate body area are crucial for processing emotion. Furthermore, the commonality analysis found that the neural representations of emotion and body orientation in the lingual and precentral gyrus are not interacting, but rather competing. Lastly, a remarkable interaction between hemisphere and body orientation revealed in the connection analysis showed that the coupling between the inferior parietal lobule and the left precentral gyrus is more sensitive to a 90° body orientation, while the coupling between the inferior parietal lobule and the right precentral gyrus is sensitive to 0° and 45° body orientation. Overall, these findings suggest that the conflicted relationship between the neural representation of body orientation and emotion in LING and PreCG when point-light displays were shown, and the different hemisphere play a different role in encoding different body orientation.