Benedetta Gencarelli

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Relationship between conceptual knowledge and the perception of facial emotions

Constructivist accounts of emotion perception propose that recognising emotion from facial expressions involves active inference: a process whereby an individual’s learned conceptual and semantic knowledge interacts with visual input to shape perception. While great inter-individual variability is well-documented in the facial expressions associated with emotions (Binetti, 2022; Murray, 2023; Gendron et al., 2014), how conceptual and semantic knowledge act on perceptual space is not yet fully parsed and how flexibly these representations can change within an individual remains unknown. For example, a person’s understanding of fear may differ across situations, such as walking near a cliff or receiving a serious medical diagnosis. If individuals’ semantic models both differ between people and change depending on situated context, this flexibility could support greater inter-individual alignment in representations and improve social communication. This project aims to (1) investigate how facial emotion recognition relates to conceptual and semantic representations within and between individuals, and (2) examine how situated contextual information is incorporated into emotion models and shapes the perceptual organisation of facial expressions.

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