ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2020
Dynamic human and avatar facial expressions elicit differential brain responses.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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8 citing papers in PubMed, 54 citations in OpenAlex.
- Context-dependent placebo hypoalgesia through observational learning: the role of empathy in immersive and non-immersive environments.NPJ digital medicine · 2026Article
- Pupil dilation reflects the social and motion content of faces.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Article
- Exploration of the role of emotional expression of treatment-resistant schizophrenia patients having followed virtual reality therapy: a content analysis.BMC psychiatry · 2023Article
- Natural human postural oscillations enhance the empathic response to a facial pain expression in a virtual character.Scientific reports · 2021Observational
- Temporal lobe epilepsy alters neural responses to human and avatar facial expressions in the face perception network.Brain and behavior · 2021Article
- How Neuroimaging Can Aid the Interpretation of Art.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
- The Effects of Dynamic and Static Emotional Facial Expressions of Humans and Their Avatars on the EEG: An ERP and ERD/ERS Study.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
14 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Computer-generated characters, so-called avatars, are widely used in advertising, entertainment, human-computer interaction or as research tools to investigate human emotion perception. However, brain responses to avatar and human faces have scarcely been studied to date. As such, it remains unclear whether dynamic facial expressions of avatars evoke different brain responses than dynamic facial expressions of humans. In this study, we designed anthropomorphic avatars animated with motion tracking and tested whether the human brain processes fearful and neutral expressions in human and avatar faces differently. Our fMRI results showed that fearful human expressions evoked stronger responses than fearful avatar expressions in the ventral anterior and posterior cingulate gyrus, the anterior insula, the anterior and posterior superior temporal sulcus, and the inferior frontal gyrus. Fearful expressions in human and avatar faces evoked similar responses in the amygdala. We did not find different responses to neutral human and avatar expressions. Our results highlight differences, but also similarities in the processing of fearful human expressions and fearful avatar expressions even if they are designed to be highly anthropomorphic and animated with motion tracking. This has important consequences for research using dynamic avatars, especially when processes are investigated that involve cortical and subcortical regions.
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