A broadly tuned network for affective body language in the macaque brain

Abstract

Body language is a powerful tool that we use to communicate how we feel, but it is unclear whether other primates also communicate in this way. Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that the body-selective patches in macaques are activated by affective body language. Unexpectedly, we found these regions to be tolerant of naturalistic variation in posture as well as species; the bodies of macaques, humans, and domestic cats all evoked a stronger response when they conveyed fear than when they conveyed no affect. Multivariate analyses confirmed that the neural representation of fear-related body expressions was species-invariant. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that, like humans, macaques have body-selective brain regions in the ventral visual pathway for processing affective body language. These data also indicate that representations of body stimuli in these regions are built on the basis of emergent properties, such as socio-affective meaning, and not just putative image properties.