Flexible predictive processing during face perception
Abstract
Perceptual expectations facilitate perception of expected information by shaping neural coding. However, how the cognitive demands of different tasks may modulate this effect remains unclear. Here, we investigated whether and how expectations derived from sex/gender stereotypes impact behavioral and neural face processing as a function of task goals. Fifty-one participants categorized either the emotional expression (happy vs. angry) or the sex (male vs. female) of faces while mouse trajectories and electroencephalography (EEG) were recorded in separate sessions. Expectations were manipulated through the congruency between facial sex and emotional expression (congruent: angry male, happy female; incongruent: happy male, angry female). Behavioral analyses revealed that incongruent faces elicited larger trajectory deviations, longer movement dynamics and slower reaction times than congruent faces. Representational Similarity Analyses (RSA) showed that face congruency modulated coding geometries of both mouse trajectories and EEG, whereas multivariate classifiers revealed progressive impact of congruency from early stages of face neural coding. Importantly, all measurements revealed stronger congruency effects during emotion than during sex judgments, indicating that the influence of expectations is flexibly tailored to task demands. Furthermore, congruent faces exhibited enhanced decoding performance and reached peak neural discriminability earlier than incongruent ones.…
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