July 27, 2021
Tohoku University Hospital
Tohoku University Graduate School of Medical Sciences
National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry
Keio University
Revealed that when a neural circuit model mimicking the biological brain was trained to predict changes in human facial expressions, categories for each emotion formed spontaneously.
Observed that when the activity of neurons in the neural circuit model was set to change abnormally, symptoms similar to autism spectrum disorder, such as modulations in emotion recognition and generalization, were observed.
Demonstrated that the "computational psychiatry" approach, which reproduces symptoms of psychiatric disorders with a neural circuit model, can contribute to understanding the mechanism of symptom onset in autism spectrum disorder.
It is believed that humans can recognize different emotions, such as "sadness" and "anger," by looking at images of facial expressions. However, the mechanism by which we learn to judge different emotions simply by looking at facial expressions during development is largely unknown. A research group including Assistant Professor Yuta Takahashi of the Department of Psychiatry at Tohoku University Hospital, Professor Hiroaki Tomita of the Tohoku University Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Senior Assistant Professor Shingo Murata of the Faculty of Science and Technology at Keio University, and Section Chief Yuichi Yamashita of the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry has succeeded in replicating the process by which humans learn to recognize emotions from facial expressions during development, and the alterations of this process in individuals with autism spectrum disorder, using a neural circuit model that reproduces the brain on a computer. This study is an important report that, for the first time, clarifies the process by which humans become capable of recognizing emotions simply by visually learning from others' facial expressions. Further development of this research is expected to advance our understanding of the process by which humans learn to recognize emotions and the cognitive characteristics of people with autism spectrum disorder, contributing to the consideration of appropriate intervention methods for individuals with disabilities that make it difficult to recognize emotions.
The results of this research were published in the online edition of the journal *Scientific Reports* at 10:00 a.m. on July 26, 2021 (local time, 6:00 p.m. JST on July 26).
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