Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Domain specific expertise affects neural and behavioral processes of perception and memory. We explore if sensorimotor expertise extends to other relevant social mechanisms, such as the neural processing of emotional faces. We recorded brain activity of 26 dancers and 26 non-dancers using visual and somatosensory evoked potentials (VEPs, SEPs) during an emotion and sex discrimination task on happy, afraid, and neutral faces. We predicted expertise-related modulation of visual facial emotion processing in visual and somatosensory areas. EEG results revealed distinct visual and somatosensory ERP patterns in the two groups. VEP findings showed that dancers distinguished between neutral and emotional faces at N170 and P200. Non-dancers differentiated between the three emotions with more lateralized processing. For SEPs, dancers uniquely showed early emotion effects (P50) in central somatosensory regions and task-modulated somatosensory engagement at later stages (N80, P100). Non-dancers showed later, localized somatosensory effects. In summary, dance expertise shapes both visual and somatosensory processing of facial emotion, indicating a broader neural representation of emotions. These findings provide novel evidence for a differential facial emotion processing in dancers, extending the dance expertise modulation beyond perception of dance-specific stimuli, to face emotion perception. Overall, this work highlights the strong influence of sensorimotor training on emotion perception.
Source: Cerebral Cortex
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $5,038
OpenAlex ID: W7225451365