Neural signatures of individual variability in context-dependent perception of ambiguous facial expression

How do we incorporate contextual information to infer others’ emotional state? Here we employed a naturalistic context-dependent facial expression estimation task where participants estimated pleasantness levels of others’ ambiguous expression faces when sniffing different contextual cues (e.g., urine, fish, water, and rose). Based on their pleasantness rating data, we placed participants on a context-dependency continuum and mapped the individual variability in the context-dependency onto the neural representation using a representational similarity analysis. We found that the individual variability in the context-dependency of facial expression estimation correlated with the activity level of the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pgACC) and the amygdala and was also decoded by the neural representation of the ventral anterior insula (vAI). A dynamic causal modeling revealed that those with higher context-dependency exhibited a greater degree of the modulation from vAI to the pgACC. These findings provide novel insights into the neural circuitry associated with the individual variability in context-dependent facial expression estimation and the first empirical evidence for individual variability in the predictive accounts of affective states.