Localization of Emotional Affect in Electrocorticography Using a Model Based Discrimination Measure

Detailed recordings of brain activity acquired using Electrocorticography (ECoG) sensors offer an opportunity to explore the activity of the human brain. We study the information content of ECoG array data with respect to the emotional affect of the subject. Lognormal spectral models are estimated on data from patients undergoing monitoring for intractable epilepsy. A model based approach for mapping discriminative locations is developed for this problem. Differing spatial sensitivity in the ECoG array allows for retrospective analysis of localized brain activity. Our discriminability measure evaluates the information content at each sensor location relative to Positive and Negative displays of emotional affect. This measure can be approximated by a symmetrized Kullback-Leibler divergence between the estimated models.