Visual looming is a primitive for human emotion

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Monica Kim Ngan Thieu, Emory University; Vladislav Ayzenberg, Emory University; Stella Lourenco, Emory University; Philip Augustus Kragel, Emory University
• Language: English
• Date: 2023-08-31
• Publisher: NIH
• Publication Version: Preprint (Prior to Peer Review)
• Copyright Statement: The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.
• License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): https://doi.org/10.1101%2F2023.08.29.555380
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: bioRxiv
• Grant/Funding Information: This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health Institutional Research and Career Development Award (IRACDA) grant K12GM000680 to MKT.
• Keywords: Drosophila visual system; defensive behavior; Looming detection
• Research Categories: Biology, Neuroscience

Abstract

Looming objects afford threat of collision across the animal kingdom. Defensive responses to looming and neural computations for looming detection are strikingly conserved across species. In mammals, information about rapidly approaching threats is conveyed from the retina to the midbrain superior colliculus, where variables that indicate the position and velocity of approach are computed to enable defensive behavior. Although neuroscientific theories posit that midbrain representations contribute to emotion through connectivity with distributed brain systems, it remains unknown whether a computational system for looming detection can predict both defensive behavior and phenomenal experience in humans. Here, we show that a shallow convolutional neural network based on the Drosophila visual system predicts defensive blinking to looming objects in infants and superior colliculus responses to optical expansion in adults. Further, the responses of the convolutional network to a broad array of naturalistic video clips predict self-reported emotion largely on the basis of subjective arousal. Our findings illustrate how motor and experiential components of human emotion relate to species-general systems for survival in unpredictable environments.