ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Neurosci.
Sec. Perception Science
This article is part of the Research TopicMultisensory integration: unveiling the complexities of perceptionView all 10 articles
Contextual Cues Shape Facial Emotion Recognition: A Combined Behavioral and ERP Study
Provisionally accepted
- 1Laboratorio de Neurociencia Afectiva (LaNA), Instituto de Bienestar Socioemocional (IBEM), Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago, Chile
- 2Doctorado en Ciencias del Desarrollo y Psicopatología, Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago, Chile
- 3The Neuropsychology and Cognitive Neurosciences Research Center (CINPSI Neurocog), Faculty of Health Sciences, Unversidad Católica del Maule, Talca, Chile
- 4Department of Psychology, Universidad Católica del Maule, Talca, Chile
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Being able to recognize the emotions in others is fundamental to social interaction, yet the precise temporal dynamics by which the brain integrates contextual cues with facial expressions remain unclear. This study used behavioral measures and event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how contextual congruency and emotional valence modulate facial emotion recognition in a neurotypical population. Participants viewed emotional faces preceded by either congruent or incongruent bimodal cues, combining vocalizations and visual images. Behaviorally, participants responded faster and made fewer errors during congruent trials than in incongruent trials, indicating that context facilitates emotional processing. At the neural level, incongruent cues elicited a significantly larger P1 component, suggesting that the brain allocates increased early attentional resources to conflicting stimuli. Furthermore, the P3 component was significantly larger for negative stimuli compared to neutral ones, highlighting the role of emotional valence in later stages of cognitive processing. Together, these findings support a multi-stage model of emotional integration, where contextual incongruency impacts processing from early perceptual encoding to later cognitive evaluation. By integrating behavioral and neural evidence, this study clarifies the temporal course of contextual integration in multisensory emotion perception and provides new insights with implications for clinical and applied research.
Keywords: Affective Neuroscience, contextual cues, Contextualmodulation, emotion recognition, emotional processing, emotional valence, event-related potentials (ERP)
Received: 21 Sep 2025; Accepted: 22 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Toro, Cortés-Rivera, Cerić and Oliveros. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Cristian Cortés-Rivera
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