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<p>Emotional experiences involve more than bodily reactions and momentary feelings—they depend on knowledge about the world that spans contexts and time. Although it is well established that individuals conceptualize emotions using a low-dimensional space organized by valence and arousal, the neural mechanisms giving rise to this configuration remain unclear. Here, we examine whether hippocampal-prefrontal circuits—neural structures implicated in forming cognitive maps—also support the structural abstraction of emotional experiences. Using functional MRI data collected as participants viewed emotionally evocative film clips, we find that hippocampal activity represents emotion concepts in a structured hierarchy, whereas ventromedial prefrontal cortex more accurately tracks locations in a two-dimensional affective space. Computational modeling reveals that hippocampal-prefrontal responses to films can be predicted based on the statistical regularities of emotion transitions across multiple temporal scales. These findings demonstrate that hippocampal-prefrontal systems represent emotion concepts in a map-like way at multiple levels of abstraction, offering insight into how the brain organizes emotion knowledge.</p>

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Map-like representations of emotion knowledge in hippocampal-prefrontal systems

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年1月26日

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  • Yumeng Ma,
  • Philip A. Kragel

摘要

Emotional experiences involve more than bodily reactions and momentary feelings—they depend on knowledge about the world that spans contexts and time. Although it is well established that individuals conceptualize emotions using a low-dimensional space organized by valence and arousal, the neural mechanisms giving rise to this configuration remain unclear. Here, we examine whether hippocampal-prefrontal circuits—neural structures implicated in forming cognitive maps—also support the structural abstraction of emotional experiences. Using functional MRI data collected as participants viewed emotionally evocative film clips, we find that hippocampal activity represents emotion concepts in a structured hierarchy, whereas ventromedial prefrontal cortex more accurately tracks locations in a two-dimensional affective space. Computational modeling reveals that hippocampal-prefrontal responses to films can be predicted based on the statistical regularities of emotion transitions across multiple temporal scales. These findings demonstrate that hippocampal-prefrontal systems represent emotion concepts in a map-like way at multiple levels of abstraction, offering insight into how the brain organizes emotion knowledge.