Beatrice de Gelder

Maastricht University | UM · Department of Cognitive Neuroscience

As social species, perception of body motion is crucial to daily interactions, yet the underlying neural processes and their dynamics are not fully understood. While well-established EEG evidence has identified temporal markers of biological body motion, and recent fMRI research points to naturalistic body networks, the temporal markers of higher-l...

Understanding how the human brain processes body movements is essential for clarifying the mechanisms underlying social cognition and interaction. This study investigates the encoding of biomechanically possible and impossible body movements in occipitotemporal cortex using ultra-high field 7Tesla fMRI. By predicting the response of single voxels t...

Blindsight refers to the ability to make accurate visual discriminations without conscious awareness of the stimuli. In this study, we present new evidence from naturalistic observations of a patient with bilateral damage to the striate cortex, who surprisingly demonstrated the ability to detect colored objects, particularly red ones. Despite the s...

The ability to predict others’ behavior is crucial for social interactions. The goal of the present study was to test whether predictions are derived during observation of social interactions and whether these predictions influence how the whole-body emotional expressions of the agents are perceived. Using a novel paradigm, we induced social predic...

Among social stimuli that trigger rapid reactions, body images occupy a prominent place. Given that bodies carry information about other agents’ intentions, actions and emotional expressions, a foundational question concerns the neural basis of body processing. Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have investigated this but...

A central question in consciousness theories is whether one is dealing with a dichotomous (“all-or-none”) or a gradual phenomenon. In this 7T fMRI study, we investigated whether dichotomy or gradualness in fact depends on the brain region associated with perceptual awareness reports. Both male and female human subjects performed an emotion discrimi...

Introduction We investigated the factors underlying naturalistic action recognition and understanding, as well as the errors occurring during recognition failures. Methods Participants saw full-light stimuli of ten different whole-body actions presented in three different conditions: as normal videos, as videos with the temporal order of the frame...

Traditionally, consciousness studies focus on domain general cognitive processes rather than on specific information reaching subjective awareness. The present study ( N = 45) used visual masking and whole-body images to investigate whether the specific emotional expression as well as gender of the stimuli and of the participants impact awareness....

Understanding facial emotions is fundamental to interact in social environments and modify behavior accordingly. Neurodegenerative processes can progressively transform affective responses and affect social competence. This exploratory study examined the neurocognitive correlates of face recognition, in individuals with two mild cognitive impairmen...

The temporo-occipital cortex (TOC) plays a key role in body and action perception, but current understanding of its functions is still limited. TOC body regions are heterogeneous and their role in action perception is poorly understood. This study adopted data-driven approaches to region selectivity and investigated the connectivity of TOC nodes an...

Among social stimuli that trigger rapid reactions, body images occupy a prominent place. Given that bodies carry information about other agents' intentions, actions and emotional expressions, a foundational question concerns the neural basis of body processing. Previous fMRI studies have investigated this but were not yet able to clarify the time c...

For social species, e.g., primates, the perceptual analysis of social interactions is an essential skill for survival, emerging already early during development. While real-life emotional behavior includes predominantly interactions between conspecifics, research on the perception of emotional body expressions has primarily focused on perception of...

There is substantial evidence supporting the processing of affective stimuli outside of conscious awareness in both healthy individuals and brain-damaged patients. However, the methodologies used to assess awareness are still a matter of debate, with also implications for dichotomous or gradual theories. In two experiments, we investigated how soci...

Research on body representation in the brain has focused on category-specific representation, using fMRI to investigate the response pattern to body stimuli in occipitotemporal cortex without so far addressing the issue of the specific computations involved in body selective regions, only defined by higher order category selectivity. This study use...

Research on social threat has shown influences of various factors, such as agent characteristics, proximity, and social interaction on social threat perception. An important, yet understudied aspect of threat exposure concerns the ability to exert control over the threat and its implications for threat perception. In this study, we used a virtual r...

Among the many kinds of bodily expressions of emotion, anger occupies an important place because of its role in social interactions and aggressive confrontations that may threaten survival. We already have a basic understanding of how aggressive body expressions are perceived and how adaptive reactions are prepared in situations of social threat. B...

Previous functional imaging studies demonstrated body-selective patches in the primate visual temporal cortex, comparing activations to static bodies and static images of other categories. However, the use of static instead of dynamic displays of moving bodies may have underestimated the extent of the body patch network. Indeed, body dynamics provi...

Two major issues in consciousness research concern the measuring methods that determine per-ceptual unawareness and whether consciousness is a gradual or an "all-or-nothing" phenomenon. This 7T fMRI study addresses both questions using a continuous flash suppression paradigm with an emotional recognition task (fear vs neutral bodies) in combination...

This ultrahigh field 7T fMRI study addressed the question of whether there exists a core network of brain areas at the service of different aspects of body perception. Participants viewed naturalistic videos of monkey and human faces, bodies, and objects along with mosaic-scrambled videos for control of low-level features. Independent component ana...

There is substantial evidence about affective stimulus processing outside awareness in healthy participants and brain-damaged patients. However, there are still methodological concerns mainly relating to the methods used to assess awareness. In two experiments, we investigated the processing of social threat in healthy participants by combining the...

La communication est initiée et orchestrée par notre compréhension des signaux non-verbaux. Ces signaux sont principalement produits par les expressions du visage et du corps. Jusqu’à très récemment, les recherches se sont focalisées sur le visage, faisant des expressions faciales l’objet principal des études de l’émotion. Heureusement, la communic...

Social threat requires fast adaptive reactions. One prominent threat-coping behavior present in both humans and other species is freezing, of which heart rate deceleration and reduced postural mobility are two key components. Previous studies mostly focused on freezing reactions in rodents, but now virtual reality offers unique possibilities for co...

Domestic violence has long-term negative consequences on children. In this study, men with a history of partner aggression and a control group of non-offenders were embodied in a child’s body from a first-person perspective in virtual reality (VR). From this perspective, participants witnessed a scene of domestic violence where a male avatar assaul...

We present here a unifying framework for affective phenomena: the Human Affectome. By synthesizing a large body of literature, we have converged on definitions that disambiguate the commonly used terms—affect, feeling, emotion, and mood. Based on this definitional foundation, and under the premise that affective states reflect allostatic concerns,...

Social threat requires fast adaptive reactions. One prominent threat-coping behavior present in both humans and other species is freezing, of which heart rate deceleration and reduced postural mobility are two key components. Previous studies mostly focused on freezing reactions in rodents, but now virtual reality offers unique possibilities for co...

We used ultra-high field (7 Tesla) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at submillimeter resolution to assess structural brain changes in congenitally blind (CB) compared to matched normal sighted control (SC) subject groups. Region-of-interest analysis revealed grey matter (GM) volumetric reductions in the CB group in left cuneus and occipital pole, r...

In the monkey brain, the precentral gyrus and ventral intraparietal area are two interconnected brain regions that form a system for detecting and responding to events in nearby “peripersonal” space (PPS), with threat detection as one of its major functions. Behavioral studies point toward a similar defensive function of PPS in humans. Here, our ai...

The social brain hypothesis posits that a disproportionate encephalization in primates enabled to adapt behavior to a social context. Also, it has been proposed that phylogenetically recent brain areas are disproportionally affected by neurodegeneration. Using structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging, the present study investigates brai...

Prosopagnosia or loss of face perception and recognition is still poorly understood and rare single cases of acquired prosopagnosia can provide a unique window on the behavioural and brain basis of normal face perception. The present study of a new case of acquired prosopagnosia with bilateral occipito-temporal lesions but a structurally intact FFA...

Social threat requires fast adaptive reactions. One prominent threat-coping behavior present in humans is freezing, of which heart rate deceleration and reduced postural mobility are two key components. Previous studies focused mainly on freezing reactions in rodents, but now virtual reality offers unique possibilities for controlled and ecological...

Recent studies provide an increasing understanding of how visual objects categories like faces or bodies are represented in the brain and also raised the question whether a category based or more dynamic network inspired models are more powerful. Two important and so far sidestepped issues in this debate are, first, how major category attributes li...

Survival prompts organisms to prepare adaptive behavior in response to environmental and social threat. However, what are the specific features of the appearance of a conspecific that trigger such adaptive behaviors? For social species, the prime candidates for triggering defense systems are the visual features of the face and the body. We propose...

How we subjectively generate an understanding of other people’s bodily actions and emotions is not well understood. In this 7T fMRI study, we examined the representational geometry of bodily action- and emotion-understanding by mapping individual subjective reports with word embeddings, besides using conventional univariate/multivariate analyses wi...

Recent studies provided an increasingly detailed understanding of how visual objects categories like faces or bodies are represented in the brain. What is less clear is how a given task impacts the representation of the object category and of its attributes. Using (fMRI) we measured BOLD responses while participants viewed whole body expressions an...

Recent behavioural studies have provided evidence that virtual reality (VR) based interventions have an impact on socio-affective processes and accumulating findings now underscore the potential of VR for therapeutic interventions. An interesting recent finding is that experiencing a violent situation as a victim in immersive VR leads to an increas...

Emotion perception from facial and vocal expressions is a multisensory process critical for human social interaction. When asked to judge emotions by attending to either face or voice, the accuracy was higher when facial expressions are congruent with vocal expressions than when they are incongruent. This congruency effect was shown to be affected...

Humans and other primate species are experts at recognizing body expressions. To understand the underlying perceptual mechanisms, we computed postural and kinematic features from affective whole-body movement videos and related them to brain processes. Using representational similarity and multivoxel pattern analyses, we showed systematic relations...

Emotions are expressed by the face, the voice and the whole body. Research on the face and the voice has not only demonstrated that emotions are perceived categorically, but that this perception can be manipulated. The purpose of this study was to investigate, via two separate experiments using adaptation and multisensory techniques, whether the pe...

Social aggression, such as domestic violence, has been associated with a reduced ability to take on others' perspectives. In this naturalistic imaging study, we investigated whether training human participants to take on a first-person embodied perspective during the experience of domestic violence enhances the identification with the victim and el...

Humans are experts at recognizing intent and emotion from other people’s body movements; however, the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Here, we computed quantitative features of body posture and kinematics and acquired behavioural ratings of these feature descriptors to investigate their role in affective whole-body movement perception....

Functional localizers allow the definition of regions of interest in the human brain that cannot be delineated by anatomical markers alone. To date, when localizing the body-selective areas of the visual cortex using fMRI, researchers have used static images of bodies and objects. However, there are other relevant brain areas involved in the proces...

Humans and other primate species are experts at recognizing affective information from body movements but the underlying brain mechanisms are still largely unknown. Previous research focusing on the brain representation of symbolic emotion categories has led to mixed results. This study used representational similarity and multi-voxel pattern analy...

Humans are experts at recognizing intent and emotion from other people’s body movements; however, the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Here, we investigated the role of kinematic and postural information in affective whole-body movement perception. For this purpose, quantitative features of body posture and kinematics were related to em...

A central issue in affective science is whether the brain represents the emotional expressions of faces, bodies and voices as abstract categories in which auditory and visual information converge in higher order conceptual and amodal representations. This study explores an alternative theory based on the hypothesis that under naturalistic condition...

The perceptual system gives priority to threat-relevant signals with survival value. In addition to the processing initiated by sensory inputs of threat signals, prioritization of threat signals may also include processes related to threat anticipation. These neural mechanisms remain largely unknown. Using ultra-high-field 7 tesla (7T) fMRI, we sho...

Auditory spatial tasks induce functional activation in the occipital—visual—cortex of early blind humans. Less is known about the effects of blindness on auditory spatial processing in the temporal—auditory—cortex. Here, we investigated spatial (azimuth) processing in congenitally and early blind humans with a phase-encoding functional magnetic res...

Computer-generated (CG) faces are an important visual interface for human-computer interaction in social contexts. Here we investigated whether the human brain processes emotion and gaze similarly in real and carefully matched CG faces. Real faces evoked greater responses in the fusiform face area than CG faces, particularly for fearful expressions...

The uncanny valley (UV) hypothesis suggests that increasingly human-like robots or virtual characters elicit more familiarity in their observers (positive affinity) with the exception of near-human characters that elicit strong feelings of eeriness (negative affinity). We studied this hypothesis in three experiments with carefully matched images of...

Humans and other animals use spatial hearing to rapidly localize events in the environment. However, neural encoding of sound location is a complex process involving the computation and integration of multiple spatial cues that are not represented directly in the sensory organ (the cochlea). Our understanding of these mechanisms has increased enorm...

Due to their ability to capture attention, emotional stimuli tend to benefit from enhanced perceptual processing, which can be helpful when such stimuli are task-relevant but hindering when they are task-irrelevant. Altered emotion-attention interactions have been associated with symptoms of affective disturbances, and emerging research focuses on...

Traditionally some of the core visual processes underlying social interaction abilities have been difficult to study because methodological as well as ethical issues stand in the way of recreating naturalistic interactions in the lab. The use of avatars in combination with virtual reality-based experiments now offers a unique chance to bring the et...

Emotions are strongly conveyed by the human body and the ability to recognize emotions from body posture or movement is still developing through childhood and adolescence. To date, very few studies have explored how these behavioural observations are paralleled by functional brain development. Furthermore, currently no studies have explored the dev...

Emotions are strongly conveyed by the human body and the ability to recognize emotions from body posture or movement is still developing through childhood and adolescence. To date, there are very few studies exploring how these behavioural observations are paralleled by functional brain development. Furthermore, there are currently no studies explo...

Emotions are expressed by the face, the voice and the whole body. Research on the face and the voice has not only demonstrated that emotions are perceived categorically, but that this perception can be manipulated. The purpose of this study was to investigate, via two separate experiments using adaptation and multisensory techniques, whether the pe...

Rodent research delineates how the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and central amygdala (CeA) control defensive behaviors, but translation of these findings to humans is needed. Here, we compare humans with natural-selective bilateral BLA lesions to rats with a chemogenetically silenced BLA. We find, across species , an essential role for the BLA in the...

The perceptual system gives priority to threat relevant signals with survival value. Its mechanism may not only include the processing initiated in the presence of threat signals but also in the mere anticipation of such signals. Here, we show that the pulvinar modulates activity in the early visual cortex (V1) specifically in threat anticipation....

Social species spend considerable time observing the body movements of others to understand their actions, predict their emotions, watch their games, or enjoy their dance movements. Given the important information obtained from body movements, we still know surprisingly little about the details of brain mechanisms underlying movement perception. In...

The human body is the most common object of pictorial representation in western art and its representations trigger a vast range of experiences from pain to pleasure. The goal of this study was to investigate brain activity triggered by paintings of male and female body images exemplifying conditions associated with pleasure or pain. Our findings s...

The bystander effect, the reduction in helping behavior in the presence of other people, has been explained predominantly by situational influences on decision making. Diverging from this view, we highlight recent evidence on the neural mechanisms and dispositional factors that determine apathy in bystanders. We put forward a new theoretical perspe...

Cortical plasticity in congenitally blind individuals leads to cross-modal activation of the visual cortex and may lead to superior perceptual processing in the intact sensory domains. Although mental imagery is often defined as a quasi-perceptual experience, it is unknown whether it follows similar cortical reorganization as perception in blind in...

Film theorists and practitioners suggest that motion can be manipulated in movie scenes to elicit emotional responses in viewers. However, our understanding of the role of motion in emotion perception remains limited. On the one hand, movies continuously depict local motion- movements of objects and humans, which are crucial for generating emotiona...

The uncanny valley hypothesis suggests that some near-human artificial entities can trigger strong but inexplicable feelings of eeriness and even horror, observable as a dip on a hypothetical curve between subjective affinity and human-likeness. Empirical studies, many of them employing continua from computer-rendered to human faces have, however,...

The observation of threatening expression in others is a strong cue for triggering an action response. One method of capturing such action responses is by measuring the amplitude of motor evoked potentials (MEPs) elicited with single pulse TMS over the primary motor cortex. Indeed, it has been shown that viewing whole body expressions of threat mod...

Virtual reality (VR) promises methodological rigour with the extra benefit of allowing us to study the context-dependent behaviour of individuals in their natural environment. Pan and Hamilton (2018, Br. J. Psychol.) provide a useful overview of methodological recommendations for using VR. Here, we highlight some other aspects of the use of VR. Our...