{"pk":28346,"title":"Unsupervised Learning Shapes Emotion Categories","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Humans perceive facial expressions categorically, though physical features of emotions vary continuously. How do cat-egorical representations of facial expressions emerge or update? We explored how supervised and unsupervised learninginfluence emotion category boundaries. 91 children (6-8-years-old) and 105 adults categorized emotions varying along aneutral-angry continuum. Participants completed a supervised learning phase, which explicitly taught an emotion cate-gory boundary. Then, participants completed an unsupervised learning phase. Without feedback, participants categorizedexpressions sampled from statistical distributions that matched or did not match the distribution categorized during su-pervised learning. Participants learned the boundary via supervised learning, but responses rapidly shifted followingthe statistical distribution via unsupervised learning. Thus, participants quickly updated emotion categories, indicatingboundaries are highly context-sensitive. Such flexibility allows individuals to adjust across situations and organize re-sponses based on extant, versus explicitly taught, socio-emotional cues. Follow-up research explores how participantsadjust category boundaries for multiple individuals varying in expressivity.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Abstracts-Posters","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/99q8v4gr","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Rista","middle_name":"","last_name":"Plate","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Wisconsin-Madison","department":""},{"first_name":"Adrienne","middle_name":"","last_name":"Wood","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Wisconsin-Madison","department":""},{"first_name":"Seth","middle_name":"D.","last_name":"Pollak","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Wisconsin-Madison","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28346/galley/18064/download/"}]}