Emotion knowledge is structured in a grid-like coordinate system in the human ventromedial prefrontal cortex
- 1Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America
- 2Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America
Abstract
Human emotional experiences vary widely in everyday life, yet they are systematically organized within a continuous affective space defined by valence and arousal. Although this circumplex organization has shaped decades of research, its neural implementation remains unclear. Here, we asked whether abstract emotion concepts are encoded using grid-like coordinate principles in the human brain. During fMRI, participants tracked trajectories through affective space conveyed through morphs of facial expressions and sequences of phrases. We found that ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) encoded affective space with robust hexadirectional modulation characteristic of grid-like coding. This coordinate representation generalized across stimulus modalities, indicating abstraction beyond perceptual features. The grid-like signal reflected a metric organization of emotion concepts independent of overt behavior, whereas distance-related signals in vmPFC predicted trial-by-trial affective judgements. Together, these findings suggest that emotion knowledge is structured by a grid-like coordinate system in the human brain that can support predictive inference and flexible decision-making.
Human emotions are organized within a continuous affective space defined by valence and arousal, but how this conceptual structure is represented in the brain remains unclear. This study shows that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex encodes emotion concepts using a grid-like coordinate system that generalizes across modalities and supports affective judgments.
Related
- From structured knowledge to flexible behaviour: the importance of local prefrontal computations
- Prefrontal-midline thalamic circuitry in rodents at the intersection of cognition, emotion and motivation
- Neural Structural Reasoner: A Brain-inspired Architecture for Reasoning over Structured Knowledge
- Knowledge-Enriched Structured EHR Features for 30-Day Hospital Readmission Prediction on MIMIC-IV
- Association of a structured prevention algorithm with nurse knowledge and device-related pressure injury severity in critical care: A pre‑post study
BibTeX
@article{ma2026emotion,
title = {{Emotion knowledge is structured in a grid-like coordinate system in the human ventromedial prefrontal cortex}},
author = {Yumeng Ma and Philip A. Kragel},
journal = {PLOS Biology},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.1371/journal.pbio.3003795},
url = {https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3003795},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Emotion knowledge is structured in a grid-like coordinate system in the human ventromedial prefrontal cortex
AU - Yumeng Ma
AU - Philip A. Kragel
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/02
JO - PLOS Biology
DO - 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003795
UR - https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3003795
AB - Human emotional experiences vary widely in everyday life, yet they are systematically organized within a continuous affective space defined by valence and arousal. Although this circumplex organization has shaped decades of research, its neural implementation remains unclear. Here, we asked whether abstract emotion concepts are encoded using grid-like coordinate principles in the human brain. During fMRI, participants tracked trajectories through affective space conveyed through morphs of facial expressions and sequences of phrases. We found that ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) encoded affective space with robust hexadirectional modulation characteristic of grid-like coding. This coordinate representation generalized across stimulus modalities, indicating abstraction beyond perceptual features. The grid-like signal reflected a metric organization of emotion concepts independent of overt behavior, whereas distance-related signals in vmPFC predicted trial-by-trial affective judgements. Together, these findings suggest that emotion knowledge is structured by a grid-like coordinate system in the human brain that can support predictive inference and flexible decision-making. Human emotions are organized within a continuous affective space defined by valence and arousal, but how this conceptual structure is represented in the brain remains unclear. This study shows that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex encodes emotion concepts using a grid-like coordinate system that generalizes across modalities and supports affective judgments.
SN - 1545-7885
ER -