We can mentally calibrate the directions of our bodily movements into visual coordinate systems to achieve purposeful actions in space. Alternatively, we can apprehend characteristics of the peri-personal space through actions performed by our own body parts. Such interactions between representations of our body motions and extrinsic space should occur in the intraparietal cortices, where the hierarchically processed somatosensory information adjoins the information on spatial vision processed along the dorsal stream. In this brain area of monkeys, we analyzed the response properties of “bimodal joint neurones”, which responded simultaneously to forearm joint displacements and visual stimuli moving in one direction in space. For the majority of these neurones, the directions of hand movements in space as a result of adequate joint displacements were congruent with the preferred directions of the moving visual stimuli. When the arm position was rotated, the preferred direction of the joint displacement became inverted so as to match the induced hand movement in space with the preferred visual stimulus direction. On the other hand, in some neurones the visual preferred direction became inverted when the joint was rotated, becoming to match the preferred direction of joint displacement. Hence, intraparietal neurones appear not only to represent mental recalibration of intrinsic movements into extrinsic coordinates, but also render delineation of extrinsic space through intrinsic actions.

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We examined the transformation process of visuomotor memory representation in far space. We conducted two experiments in which participants were asked to memorize target locations and, after a short delay, to point to the memorized target after body rotation to particular angles. The results were that (1) after body rotation, participants pointed to the locations displaced toward the body position before, not after, rotation, and the magnitude of the displacement increased as the rotational angle of the body increased, and (2) that participants reproduced the memorized space for pointing as shrunken after body rotation, and the ratio of reproduction decreased as the rotational angle of the body increased, to approximately 90% and 45% of the original space after 10-deg and 140-deg body rotation, respectively. We concluded that the effect of body rotation on the body-centered spatial representation and the compensative contribution of the environment-centered spatial representation in transforming the spatial memory after body rotation is considerable.

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This study looks at the Japanese dance form, Butoh, and examines subjects’ similarity ratings of ten affects to see whether they form a circumplex structure. Naïve western viewers observed pairwise presentation of 15 second movie clips of dance segments devised to convey different affects. For each possible pairing of the ten affects observers provided a rating of dissimilarity of the dance movements. These dissimilarity ratings were analyzed using the Proxscal algorithm for multidimensional scaling. The results suggest a circumplex structure, with two dimensions that correspond to activation and valence. The cues which may aid recovery of activation and valence from movement are discussed.

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Some psychological studies have shown that changes in gaze direction trigger reflexive shifts of attention. The cortical region responding to eye gaze has connections with both of the two visual pathways responsible for spatial orientation and feature analysis. The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of gaze-triggered attention on these two visual functions. Participants engaged in both location and orientation discrimination tasks with an uninformative gaze cue. The results indicate that the gaze direction of a schematic face facilitates responses only in the location discrimination task, and not in the orientation discrimination task. These results suggest a specific contribution of gaze perception to the processing of spatial orientation information. Moreover, further analysis of the data revealed that the compatibility between the gaze direction and the target location would be retained in implicit short-term memory.

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To clarify how the brain understands the speaker’s mind for verbal acts, we analyzed fMRI images obtained from 24 subjects when they judged linguistic meanings or emotional manners of spoken phrases. The target phrases had linguistically positive or negative meanings and were uttered warmheartedly or coldheartedly by a woman speaker. Significant interaction effects of meaning and manner were observed on the acoustic characteristics of utterances, such as F0 range, and also on the perceptual behavior evaluated by response time and judgment correctness. When compared to the female subjects, the male subjects showed significantly stronger activation only in the right frontomedian cortex, which can be hypothesized to analyze and understand speaker’s hidden but true intentions from speaking acts. These results suggest that emotion modulates linguistic processes not only in speech production but also in speech perception, and such modulations differ between the genders at least in perceptual processes.

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In this article, we review existing empirical research into the effects of damage to the amygdala on the recognition of facial, bodily and vocal emotional expressions. The evidence indicates that amygdala damage impairs the recognition of emotional expressions. Based on these neuropsychological data, together with anatomical, physiological, neuroimaging and psychological data, we propose that the characteristics of the involvement of the amygdala in the recognition of emotional expressions in normal brain are as follows: (1) The amygdala is involved in the recognition of emotional expressions irrespective of the stimulus type or the sensory modality; (2) The amygdala is necessary not only for the acquisition of emotional knowledge during development but also for online recognition processes in adults; (3) The amygdala is involved particularly in the recognition of negative emotional expressions, although the specific emotional categories in which the amygdala is involved differ among stimuli and subjects, i.e., the amygdala is not necessarily involved only in recognizing fear; (4) The amygdala inhibits the tendency to misrecognize negative emotional expressions as being positive.

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