The Electrophysiology and Time Course of Processing Vocal Emotion Expressions

2018 ◽  
pp. 458-472
Author(s):  
Silke Paulmann ◽  
Sonja A. Kotz
Keyword(s):  
Time Course ◽  
Emotion Processing ◽  
Task Demands ◽  
Emotional Communication ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Eeg Recordings ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Expression Processing ◽  
Processing Steps ◽  
Vocal Emotion

Emotional communication is a key component of human social interactions. Listeners need to rapidly decode emotionally relevant signals and adapt their behaviour accordingly. This chapter summarizes recent findings on the time course underlying vocal emotion processing, with a particular focus on suprasegmental information as expressed by the voice and intonation in speech. Evidence from both behavioural investigations and electrophysiological (EEG) recordings confirms that vocal emotion processing includes early rapid—most likely involuntary—appraisal, as well as enhanced cognitive emotional meaning evaluation. Reviewed findings also suggest that influences such as task demands, individual differences, as well as social-psychological factors can alter the identified processing steps. In short, findings suggest that emotional vocal expression processing is a multi-layered process which follows a distinct time course.

Area MT Neurons Respond to Visual Motion Distant From Their Receptive Fields

2005 ◽  
Vol 94 (6) ◽  
pp. 4156-4167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Zaksas ◽  
Tatiana Pasternak
Keyword(s):  
Time Course ◽  
Visual Motion ◽  
Cognitive Task ◽  
Receptive Fields ◽  
Direction Selectivity ◽  
Task Demands ◽  
Visual Signals ◽  
Area Mt ◽  
Mt Neurons ◽  
Stimulus Offset

Neurons in cortical area MT have localized receptive fields (RF) representing the contralateral hemifield and play an important role in processing visual motion. We recorded the activity of these neurons during a behavioral task in which two monkeys were required to discriminate and remember visual motion presented in the ipsilateral hemifield. During the task, the monkeys viewed two stimuli, sample and test, separated by a brief delay and reported whether they contained motion in the same or in opposite directions. Fifty to 70% of MT neurons were activated by the motion stimuli presented in the ipsilateral hemifield at locations far removed from their classical receptive fields. These responses were in the form of excitation or suppression and were delayed relative to conventional MT responses. Both excitatory and suppressive responses were direction selective, but the nature and the time course of their directionality differed from the conventional excitatory responses recorded with stimuli in the RF. Direction selectivity of the excitatory remote response was transient and early, whereas the suppressive response developed later and persisted after stimulus offset. The presence or absence of these unusual responses on error trials, as well as their magnitude, was affected by the behavioral significance of stimuli used in the task. We hypothesize that these responses represent top-down signals from brain region(s) accessing information about stimuli in the entire visual field and about the behavioral state of the animal. The recruitment of neurons in the opposite hemisphere during processing of behaviorally relevant visual signals reveals a mechanism by which sensory processing can be affected by cognitive task demands.

scholarly journals Neural Encoding of Attended Continuous Speech under Different Types of Interference

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (11) ◽  
pp. 1606-1619 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Olguin ◽  
Tristan A. Bekinschtein ◽  
Mirjana Bozic
Keyword(s):  
Selective Attention ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
Neural Encoding ◽  
Continuous Speech ◽  
Auditory Selective Attention ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Cross Correlations ◽  
Different Depths ◽  
Eeg Recordings

We examined how attention modulates the neural encoding of continuous speech under different types of interference. In an EEG experiment, participants attended to a narrative in English while ignoring a competing stream in the other ear. Four different types of interference were presented to the unattended ear: a different English narrative, a narrative in a language unknown to the listener (Spanish), a well-matched nonlinguistic acoustic interference (Musical Rain), and no interference. Neural encoding of attended and unattended signals was assessed by calculating cross-correlations between their respective envelopes and the EEG recordings. Findings revealed more robust neural encoding for the attended envelopes compared with the ignored ones. Critically, however, the type of the interfering stream significantly modulated this process, with the fully intelligible distractor (English) causing the strongest encoding of both attended and unattended streams and latest dissociation between them and nonintelligible distractors causing weaker encoding and early dissociation between attended and unattended streams. The results were consistent over the time course of the spoken narrative. These findings suggest that attended and unattended information can be differentiated at different depths of processing analysis, with the locus of selective attention determined by the nature of the competing stream. They provide strong support to flexible accounts of auditory selective attention.

Tracking markers of response inhibition in electroencephalographic data: why should we and how can we go beyond the N2 component?

2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Albares ◽  
Guillaume Lio ◽  
Philippe Boulinguez
Keyword(s):  
Response Inhibition ◽  
Executive Control ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Event Related Potential ◽  
Time Frequency ◽  
Inhibitory Mechanisms ◽  
Prepotent Response ◽  
Combined Use ◽  
Brain Behavior ◽  
Processing Steps

AbstractResponse inhibition is a pivotal component of executive control, which is especially difficult to assess. Indeed, it is a substantial challenge to gauge brain-behavior relationships because this function is precisely intended to suppress overt measurable behaviors. A further complication is that no single neuroimaging method has been found that can disentangle the accurate time-course of concurrent excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms. Here, we argue that this objective can be achieved with electroencephalography (EEG) on some conditions. Based on a systematic review, we emphasize that the standard event-related potential N2 (N200) is not an appropriate marker of prepotent response inhibition. We provide guidelines for assessing the cortical brain dynamics of response inhibition with EEG. This includes the combined use of inseparable data processing steps (source separation, source localization, and single-trial and time-frequency analyses) as well as the amendment of the classical experimental designs to enable the recording of different kinds of electrophysiological activity predicted by different models of response inhibition. We conclude with an illustration based on recent findings of how fruitful this approach can be.

His or mine? The time course of self–other discrimination in emotion processing

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelia Herbert ◽  
Beate M. Herbert ◽  
Thomas Ethofer ◽  
Paul Pauli
Keyword(s):  
Time Course ◽  
Emotion Processing

scholarly journals Deficits in Voice-Identity Processing: Acquired and Developmental Phonagnosia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Roswandowitz ◽  
Corrina Maguinness ◽  
Katharina von Kriegstein
Keyword(s):  
Brain Damage ◽  
Social Communication ◽  
Emotional State ◽  
Brain Lesion ◽  
Person Recognition ◽  
Paralinguistic Information ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Vocal Speech ◽  
Identity Processing ◽  
Vocal Emotion

The voice contains elementary social communication cues, conveying speech, as well as paralinguistic information pertaining to the emotional state and the identity of the speaker. In contrast to vocal-speech and vocal-emotion processing, voice-identity processing has been less explored. This seems surprising, given the day-to-day significance of person recognition by voice. A valuable approach to unravel how voice-identity processing is accomplished is to investigate people who have a selective deficit in recognising voices. Such a deficit has been termed phonagnosia. In the present chapter, we provide a systematic overview of studies on phonagnosia and how they relate to current neurocognitive models of person recognition. We review studies that have characterised people who suffer from phonagnosia following brain damage (i.e. acquired phonagnosia) and also studies, which have examined phonagnosia cases without apparent brain lesion (i.e. developmental phonagnosia). Based on the reviewed literature, we emphasise the need for a careful behavioural characterisation of phonagnosia cases by taking into consideration the multistage nature of voice-identity processing and the resulting behavioural phonagnosia subtypes.

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