Sensorimotor expertise effects extend from dance to face perception.
- 1Centre for Cognition and Neuroscience, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, City St George's, University of London, Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB, United Kingdom.
- 2Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, University of Pennsylvania, 3 West Gates Building, 3400 Spruce St, Philadelphia, PA, United States.
Abstract
Domain specific expertise affects neural and behavioral processes of perception and memory. We explore if sensorimotor expertise extends to other relevant social mechanisms, such as the neural processing of emotional faces. We recorded brain activity of 26 dancers and 26 non-dancers using visual and somatosensory evoked potentials (VEPs, SEPs) during an emotion and sex discrimination task on happy, afraid, and neutral faces. We predicted expertise-related modulation of visual facial emotion processing in visual and somatosensory areas. EEG results revealed distinct visual and somatosensory ERP patterns in the two groups. VEP findings showed that dancers distinguished between neutral and emotional faces at N170 and P200. Non-dancers differentiated between the three emotions with more lateralized processing. For SEPs, dancers uniquely showed early emotion effects (P50) in central somatosensory regions and task-modulated somatosensory engagement at later stages (N80, P100). Non-dancers showed later, localized somatosensory effects. In summary, dance expertise shapes both visual and somatosensory processing of facial emotion, indicating a broader neural representation of emotions. These findings provide novel evidence for a differential facial emotion processing in dancers, extending the dance expertise modulation beyond perception of dance-specific stimuli, to face emotion perception. Overall, this work highlights the strong influence of sensorimotor training on emotion perception.
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BibTeX
@article{meletaki2026sensorimotor,
title = {{Sensorimotor expertise effects extend from dance to face perception.}},
author = {Vasiliki Meletaki and Bettina Forster and Beatriz Calvo-Merino},
journal = {Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.1093/cercor/bhag186},
url = {https://europepmc.org/article/MED/42998268},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Sensorimotor expertise effects extend from dance to face perception.
AU - Vasiliki Meletaki
AU - Bettina Forster
AU - Beatriz Calvo-Merino
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/01
JO - Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)
DO - 10.1093/cercor/bhag186
UR - https://europepmc.org/article/MED/42998268
AB - Domain specific expertise affects neural and behavioral processes of perception and memory. We explore if sensorimotor expertise extends to other relevant social mechanisms, such as the neural processing of emotional faces. We recorded brain activity of 26 dancers and 26 non-dancers using visual and somatosensory evoked potentials (VEPs, SEPs) during an emotion and sex discrimination task on happy, afraid, and neutral faces. We predicted expertise-related modulation of visual facial emotion processing in visual and somatosensory areas. EEG results revealed distinct visual and somatosensory ERP patterns in the two groups. VEP findings showed that dancers distinguished between neutral and emotional faces at N170 and P200. Non-dancers differentiated between the three emotions with more lateralized processing. For SEPs, dancers uniquely showed early emotion effects (P50) in central somatosensory regions and task-modulated somatosensory engagement at later stages (N80, P100). Non-dancers showed later, localized somatosensory effects. In summary, dance expertise shapes both visual and somatosensory processing of facial emotion, indicating a broader neural representation of emotions. These findings provide novel evidence for a differential facial emotion processing in dancers, extending the dance expertise modulation beyond perception of dance-specific stimuli, to face emotion perception. Overall, this work highlights the strong influence of sensorimotor training on emotion perception.
SN - 1047-3211
SN - 1460-2199
ER -