People-selectivity, audiovisual integration and heteromodality in the superior temporal sulcus

The functional role of the superior temporal sulcus (STS) has been implicated in a number of studies, including those investigating face perception, voice perception, and face–voice integration. However, the nature of the STS preference for these ‘social stimuli’ remains unclear, as does the location within the STS for specific types of information processing. The aim of this study was to directly examine properties of the STS in terms of selective response to social stimuli. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan participants whilst they were presented with auditory, visual, or audiovisual stimuli of people or objects, with the intention of localising areas preferring both faces and voices (i.e., ‘people-selective’ regions) and audiovisual regions designed to specifically integrate person-related information. Results highlighted a ‘people-selective, heteromodal’ region in the trunk of the right STS which was activated by both faces and voices, and a restricted portion of the right posterior STS (pSTS) with an integrative preference for information from people, as compared to objects. These results point towards the dedicated role of the STS as a ‘social-information processing’ centre

Cerebral processing of voice gender studied using a continuous carryover fMRI design

Normal listeners effortlessly determine a person's gender by voice, but the cerebral mechanisms underlying this ability remain unclear. Here, we demonstrate 2 stages of cerebral processing during voice gender categorization. Using voice morphing along with an adaptation-optimized functional magnetic resonance imaging design, we found that secondary auditory cortex including the anterior part of the temporal voice areas in the right hemisphere responded primarily to acoustical distance with the previously heard stimulus. In contrast, a network of bilateral regions involving inferior prefrontal and anterior and posterior cingulate cortex reflected perceived stimulus ambiguity. These findings suggest that voice gender recognition involves neuronal populations along the auditory ventral stream responsible for auditory feature extraction, functioning in pair with the prefrontal cortex in voice gender perception

The 8th Summit: Women's ascent of organisations

In this inaugural address I follow the statement of who I am and why I am passionate about addressing the challenges facing career-oriented women, with a brief reflection on recent patterns to gender diversity across business, government, and academia. Sadly, the statistics present a rather dismal picture that is of little surprise to many of us. I then turn to the literature to provide an overview of the various factors considered to contribute to the current status. Informed by these insights, and by my own research findings, I discuss the role that universities and business schools need to play to create the gender-balanced eco-systems necessary to provide equal opportunity for men and women. I argue that advocacy, leadership, and action are crucial if we are to produce a cadre of leaders whose thinking is far less unconsciously biased, future leaders capable and motivated to make the needed transformation. I make a case for significant changes to curriculum content – courses taught, materials used, and role-models engaged – and research needed to inform each of these elements. I conclude by discussing the Centre for Women and Organisations and the leadership role it is currently playing, and intends to, play to contribute to the debate and actions needed for the eco-system transformation called for by many dominant thinkers and organisations around the globe. I argue for advocacy as a key factor supporting this agenda and discuss the contribution that I hope to make with the support and active engagement of many stakeholders within and outside our Business School and our University

Neural Substrates of Attentive Listening Assessed with a Novel Auditory Stroop Task

A common explanation for the interference effect in the classic visual Stroop test is that reading a word (the more automatic semantic response) must be suppressed in favor of naming the text color (the slower sensory response). Neuroimaging studies also consistently report anterior cingulate/medial frontal, lateral prefrontal, and anterior insular structures as key components of a network for Stroop-conflict processing. It remains unclear, however, whether automatic processing of semantic information can explain the interference effect in other variants of the Stroop test. It also is not known if these frontal regions serve a specific role in visual Stroop conflict, or instead play a more universal role as components of a more generalized, supramodal executive-control network for conflict processing. To address these questions, we developed a novel auditory Stroop test in which the relative dominance of semantic and sensory feature processing is reversed. Listeners were asked to focus either on voice gender (a more automatic sensory discrimination task) or on the gender meaning of the word (a less automatic semantic task) while ignoring the conflicting stimulus feature. An auditory Stroop effect was observed when voice features replaced semantic content as the “to-be-ignored” component of the incongruent stimulus. Also, in sharp contrast to previous Stroop studies, neural responses to incongruent stimuli studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed greater recruitment of conflict loci when selective attention was focused on gender meaning (semantic task) over voice gender (sensory task). Furthermore, in contrast to earlier Stroop studies that implicated dorsomedial cortex in visual conflict processing, interference-related activation in both of our auditory tasks was localized ventrally in medial frontal areas, suggesting a dorsal-to-ventral separation of function in medial frontal cortex that is sensitive to stimulus context

The effect of female voice on verbal processing

Previous studies have suggested that female voices may impede verbal processing. For example, words were remembered less well and lexical decision was slower when spoken by a female speaker. The current study tried to replicate this gender effect in an auditory semantic/associative priming task that excluded any effects of speaker variability and extended previous research by examining the role of two voice features important in perceived gender: pitch and formant frequencies. Additionally, listener gender was included in the experimental design. Results show that, contrary to previous findings, there is no evidence that a lexical decision of a target word is slower when spoken by a female speaker than by a male speaker for female and male listeners. Additionally, the semantic/associative priming effect was not affected by speaker gender, neither did female mean pitch or formants predict the semantic/associative priming effect. At the behavioural level, the current study found no evidence for a gender effect in a semantic/associative priming task.Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Spoken language processing: piecing together the puzzle

Attempting to understand the fundamental mechanisms underlying spoken language processing, whether it is viewed as behaviour exhibited by human beings or as a faculty simulated by machines, is one of the greatest scientific challenges of our age. Despite tremendous achievements over the past 50 or so years, there is still a long way to go before we reach a comprehensive explanation of human spoken language behaviour and can create a technology with performance approaching or exceeding that of a human being. It is argued that progress is hampered by the fragmentation of the field across many different disciplines, coupled with a failure to create an integrated view of the fundamental mechanisms that underpin one organism's ability to communicate with another. This paper weaves together accounts from a wide variety of different disciplines concerned with the behaviour of living systems - many of them outside the normal realms of spoken language - and compiles them into a new model: PRESENCE (PREdictive SENsorimotor Control and Emulation). It is hoped that the results of this research will provide a sufficient glimpse into the future to give breath to a new generation of research into spoken language processing by mind or machine. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Características vocais de mulheres transexuais atendidas pelo Programa Transdisciplinar de Identidade de Gênero

Disforia de Gênero (DG- APA -2013) ou transexualidade é referida quando a identidade de gênero na qual a pessoa se identifica não condiz com o sexo biológico e com o gênero atribuído a ela no nascimento. Os estudos sobre a voz na população transexual ainda são escassos, principalmente no Brasil. Uma voz não condizente com a imagem pessoal da identidade vivida tende a ser insatisfatória para essa população. O estudo investigou 24 parâmetros acústicos de voz de 30 mulheres transexuais, com idades entre 19 e 52 anos, atendidas no Programa Transdiciplinar de Identidade de Gênero (PROTIG), comparados com parâmetros acústicos vocais de 31 mulheres cisgênero, com idades entre 20 e 48 anos. Um questionário padronizado foi administrado para coletar dados demográficos dos participantes. Os sons da vogal /a/ de todos os participantes foram coletados e analisados pelo sistema avançado do multi-dimensional voice program. Foram encontradas diferenças estatisticamente significativas entre mulheres cisgêneros e transexuais em 14 medidas (p <0.05): frequência fundamental, frequência fundamental máxima, frequência fundamental mínima, desvio padrão da frequência fundamental, jitter absoluto, porcentagem ou jitter relativo, perturbação da média relativa da frequência fundamental, perturbação da frequência fundamental, quociente, quociente de perturbação da frequência fundamental suavizada, variação da frequência fundamental, shimmer absoluto, shimmer relativo, índice de turbulência da voz (valores mais baixos nos casos) e índice de fonação suave (valores mais altos nos casos). O valor médio da frequência fundamental foi de 159,046 Hz para os casos e 192,435 Hz para os controles. Nossos resultado encontrou que, por meio de adaptações glóticas, o grupo de mulheres transexuais conseguiu feminilizar suas vozes, sem tratamento, apresentando vozes menos aperiódicas e mais suaves que as das mulheres cisgêneros.Gender Dysphoria (DG-APA -2013) or transsexuality is referred to when the gender identity in which the person identifies is not consistent with biological sex and the gender attributed to him at birth. Studies on voice in the transexual population are still scarce, especially in Brazil. A voice not consistent with the past image tends to be unsatisfactory for this population.This study investigated 24 acoustic parameters of the voice of the 30 transsexual women (age 19-52 years) seen in PROTIG compared with 31 cisgender women (age 20-48 years). A standardized questionnaire was administered to collect demographic data from the participants. The sounds of the vowel / a / from all participants were collected and analyzed by the advanced system of the Multidimensional Voice Program. Statistically significant differences were found between cisgender and transsexual women in 14 measures (p <0.05): fundamental frequency, maximum fundamental frequency, minimum fundamental frequency, standard deviation of the fundamental frequency, absolute jitter, percentage or relative jitter, disturbance of the relative average of the fundamental frequency, frequency disturbance fundamental. quotient, smoothed fundamental frequency disturbance quotient, fundamental frequency variation, absolute shimmer, relative shimmer, voice turbulence index (lowest values in cases) and smooth phonation index (highest values in cases). The average value of the fundamental frequency was 159.046 Hz for the cases and 192.435 Hz for the controls. Thus, it was concluded that through glottal adaptations, the group of transsexual women managed to feminize their voices, without treatment, presenting less aperiodic and softer voices than those of cisgender women

On the Representation of Speaker Information in Human Voices: An Adaptation Approach

Apart from being carriers of speech, human voices contain a wealth of social signals, for instance about a speaker’s gender, identity, or age, to name but a few. The present thesis is concerned with the way adaptation modifies the perception of gender and identity information from voices. Adaptation is a mechanism by which neural responses decrease after continuous or repetitive stimulation. It is revealed by transient perceptual aftereffects indicating contrastive coding of simple and complex stimulus properties. The three studies reported here investigate unimodal and crossmodal auditory voice aftereffects of adaptation to unfamiliar and personally familiar speakers. Specifically, study I (Exp. 1) shows that adaptation to unfamiliar voices of female or male speakers biases the perception of voice gender away from the adapting gender: test voices, as created by auditory morphing between male and female voices, are perceived as more male following adaptation to female voices and vice versa. The voice gender aftereffect (VGAE) survived at least a few minutes and suggests the existence of voice detectors tuned to female and male voice quality. The absence of voice aftereffects following adaptation to names (Exp. 2), faces (Exp. 3), or sinusoidal tones matched to F0 of adaptor voices (Exp. 4) further suggests that the VGAE is due to habituation of high-level auditory representations. Study II replicates behavioural findings of study I (Exp. 1) and further supports the notion of processing selectivity for female and male voices by providing electrophysiological evidence. Systematic adaptation-induced amplitude reductions in AEPs (N1, P2, and P3) were observed in response to otherwise identical test voices when test voices and adaptors had the same gender as opposed to different genders. This suggests that contrastive coding of voice gender is implemented by auditory cortex neurons and takes place within the first few hundred milliseconds from voice onset. Similar to the VGAE, auditory aftereffects of adaptation to voices or faces of personally familiar speakers caused contrastive aftereffects in listeners’ perception of voice identity (study III). Unimodal voice-to-voice aftereffects (Exp. 1) were more pronounced and more persistent than crossmodal face-to-voice aftereffects (Exp. 2) pointing to at least two perceptual mechanisms of voice identity adaptation: one related to auditory coding of voice characteristics and one related to multimodal coding of speaker identity. These results complement findings in face perception (z.B. Leopold et al., 2001; Webster et al., 2004) and suggest that adaptation is a ubiquitous mechanism that routinely influences the perception of non-linguistic social information from both faces and voices

Emotional Prosody Processing in the Schizophrenia Spectrum.

THESIS ABSTRACT Emotional prosody processing impairment is proposed to be a main contributing factor for the formation of auditory verbal hallucinations in patients with schizophrenia. In order to evaluate such assumption, five experiments in healthy, highly schizotypal and schizophrenia populations are presented. The first part of the thesis seeks to reveal the neural underpinnings of emotional prosody comprehension (EPC) in a non-clinical population as well as the modulation of prosodic abilities by hallucination traits. By revealing the brain representation of EPC, an overlap at the neural level between EPC and auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) was strongly suggested. By assessing the influence of hallucinatory traits on EPC abilities, a continuum in the schizophrenia spectrum in which high schizotypal population mirrors the neurocognitive profile of schizophrenia patients was established. Moreover, by studying the relation between AVH and EPC in non-clinical population, potential confounding effects of medication influencing the findings were minimized. The second part of the thesis assessed two EPC related abilities in schizophrenia patients with and without hallucinations. Firstly, voice identity recognition, a skill which relies on the analysis of some of the same acoustical features as EPC, has been evaluated in patients and controls. Finally, the last study presented in the current thesis, assessed the influence that implicit processing of emotional prosody has on selective attention in patients and controls. Both patients studies demonstrate that voice identity recognition deficits as well as abnormal modulation of selective attention by implicit emotion prosody are related to hallucinations exclusively and not to schizophrenia in general. In the final discussion, a model in which EPC deficits are a crucial factor in the formation of AVH is evaluated. Experimental findings presented in the previous chapters strongly suggests that the perception of prosodic features is impaired in patients with AVH, resulting in aberrant perception of irrelevant auditory objects with emotional prosody salience which captures the attention of the hearer and which sources (speaker identity) cannot be recognized. Such impairments may be due to structural and functional abnormalities in a network which comprises the superior temporal gyrus as a central element