Emotion knowledge is structured in a grid-like coordinate system in the human ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

Ventromedial prefrontal cortex encodes affective space with robust hexadirectional modulation, showing grid-like coordinate coding for emotion concepts across modalities during fMRI.

• Why it matters: Emotion research has long described a valence–arousal circumplex, but how the brain implements this continuous affective structure is still unclear.
• What they did: In fMRI, participants tracked paths through affective space using facial-expression morphs and phrase sequences, testing whether vmPFC shows grid-like modulation and how it relates to judgments.
• The result: The vmPFC grid-like signal generalized across modalities and reflects metric organization independent of overt behavior, while distance-related activity predicted trial-by-trial affective judgments.

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