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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access published online on February 8, 2008
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, doi:10.1093/scan/nsn002
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Learning affective values for faces is expressed in amygdala and fusiform gyrus

Predrag Petrovic, Raffael Kalisch, Mathias Pessiglione, Tania Singer and Raymond J. Dolan

Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College of London, 12 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3BG, UK

To monitor the environment for social threat humans must build affective evaluations of others. These evaluations are malleable and to a high degree shaped by responses engendered by specific social encounters. The precise neuronal mechanism by which these evaluations are constructed is poorly understood. We tested a hypothesis that conjoint activity in amygdala and fusiform gyrus would correlate with acquisition of social stimulus value. We tested this using a reinforcement learning algorithm, Q-learning, that assigned values to faces as a function of a history of pairing, or not pairing, with aversive shocks. Behaviourally, we observed a correlation between conditioning induced changes in skin conductance response (SCR) and subjective ratings for likeability of faces. Activity in both amygdala and fusiform gyrus (FG) correlated with the output of the reinforcement learning algorithm parameterized by these ratings. In amygdala, this effect was greater for averted than direct gaze faces. Furthermore, learning-related activity change in these regions correlated with SCR and subjective ratings. We conclude that amygdala and fusiform encode affective value in a manner that closely approximates a standard computational solution to learning.

Keywords: amygdala; fusiform gyrus; reinforcement learning; face stimuli; affective value

Correspondence should be addressed to Predrag Petrovic, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College of London, 12 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3BG, UK. E-mail: predrag.petrovic{at}ki.se

Received June 25, 2007. Accepted January 9, 2008.


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