EEG decoding of multidimensional information from emotional faces

Humans can detect and recognize faces quickly, but there has been little research on the temporal dynamics of the different dimensional face information that is extracted. The present study aimed to investigate the time course of neural responses to the representation of different dimensional face information, such as age, gender, emotion, and identity. We used support vector machine decoding to obtain representational dissimilarity matrices of event-related potential responses to different faces for each subject over time. In addition, we performed representational similarity analysis with the model representational dissimilarity matrices that contained different dimensional face information. Three significant findings were observed. First, the extraction process of facial emotion occurred before that of facial identity and lasted for a long time, which was specific to the right frontal region. Second, arousal was preferentially extracted before valence during the processing of facial emotional information. Third, different dimensional face information exhibited representational stability during different periods. In conclusion, these findings reveal the precise temporal dynamics of multidimensional information processing in faces and provide powerful support for computational models on emotional face perception.