Decoding Humor Experiences from Brain Activity of People Viewing Comedy Movies
Figure 1
Decoding of humor experiences.
(A) Definition of neutral and humor labels. Neutral and eight types of humor labels are defined based on the lag before or after the onset of a humor report. The upper plot shows a time-series of humor reports. The lower plot is the magnified view of the highlighted area shown on the upper plot, showing examples of the defined labels. Eight distinct humor labels ‘ht’ (t = -6–8 for each 2 s) are assigned to fMRI time-series data from six seconds before to eight seconds after the onset of each humor report. The other fMRI data that are more than six seconds before or more than eight seconds after the humor onset are assigned the ‘neutral’ label. Note that ht with t > 0 is given priority over ht with t<0 when multiple humor reports occur in a short period. When consecutive ‘h0’ labels could be assigned in the case that a subject kept a slider up for several seconds, only the first ‘h0’ label is placed and no labels are assigned to fMRI data that would otherwise be assigned the successive ‘h0’ labels. (B) Training and testing humor decoders. For each humor label ht, we constructed decoders that predict ‘ht‘ or ‘neutral’ for a given fMRI data sample. A training and testing data set for the ht-decoder were created by choosing ht- and neutral-labeled data samples from all the data obtained during movie viewing. Note that the training and testing data sets were independent, as nine out of ten runs were used for training and the remaining one run was used for creating the testing data set.