The predominant functional connections of recognizing fear and surprise expression: a MEG study

Abstract

Facial expression, powerful non-verbal signals, contains abundant personal information and social communication information. Accurately identifying these signals is critical to the success of interpersonal communication. Studies have shown that both children and adults tend to confuse surprise with fear rather than sadness, anger, or disgust. However, the studies of fear and surprise expression recognition using network pattern based on MEG is only a few. In this study, we monitored the brain activity of 6 subjects as they perform a recognition task of fear and surprise, and subsequently constructed a network of brain functional connections. By using rank sum test and random forest, the most discriminative and representative 6 FCs from 2278 FCs were selected. The group of these 6 FCs can give a best prediction performance of 78.56%. Additionally, we also found that people tend to refer to surprise as fear when distinguishing between fear and surprise.