Papers by Marianne Latinus
NeuroImage, Jan 24, 2015
FMRI studies increasingly examine functions and properties of non-primary areas of human auditory... more FMRI studies increasingly examine functions and properties of non-primary areas of human auditory cortex. However there is currently no standardized localization procedure to reliably identify specific areas across individuals such as the standard 'localizers' available in the visual domain. Here we present an fMRI 'voice localizer' scan allowing rapid and reliable localization of the voice-sensitive 'temporal voice areas' (TVA) of human auditory cortex. We describe results obtained using this standardized localizer scan in a large cohort of normal adult subjects. Most participants (94%) showed bilateral patches of significantly greater response to vocal than non-vocal sounds along the superior temporal sulcus/gyrus (STS/STG). Individual activation patterns, although reproducible, showed high inter-individual variability in precise anatomical location. Cluster analysis of individual peaks from the large cohort highlighted three bilateral clusters of voice-sen...
We investigated the human face specificity by comparing the effects of inversion and contrast rev... more We investigated the human face specificity by comparing the effects of inversion and contrast reversal, two manipulations known to disrupt configural face processing, on human and ape faces, isolated eyes and objects, using event-related potentials. The face sensitive marker, N170, was shortest to human faces and delayed by inversion and contrast reversal for all categories and not only for human
Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, Jan 28, 2015
Gaze direction, a cue of both social and spatial attention, is known to modulate early neural res... more Gaze direction, a cue of both social and spatial attention, is known to modulate early neural responses to faces e.g. N170. However, findings in the literature have been inconsistent, likely reflecting differences in stimulus characteristics and task requirements. Here, we investigated the effect of task on neural responses to dynamic gaze changes: away and toward transition (resulting or not in eye contact). Subjects performed, in random order, social (away/toward them) and non-social (left/right) judgment tasks on these stimuli. Overall, in the non-social task, results showed a larger N170 to gaze aversion than gaze motion toward the observer. In the social task, however, this difference was no longer present in the right hemisphere, likely reflecting an enhanced N170 to gaze motion toward the observer. Our behavioral and ERP data indicate that performing social judgments enhances saliency of gaze motion toward the observer, even those that did not result in gaze contact. These da...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2015
Our brains readily decode facial movements and changes in social attention, reflected in earlier ... more Our brains readily decode facial movements and changes in social attention, reflected in earlier and larger N170 event-related potentials (ERPs) to viewing gaze aversions vs. direct gaze in real faces (Puce et al., 2000). In contrast, gaze aversions in line-drawn faces do not produce these N170 differences (Rossi et al., 2014), suggesting that physical stimulus properties or experimental context may drive these effects. Here we investigated the role of stimulus-induced context on neurophysiological responses to dynamic gaze. Sixteen healthy adults viewed line-drawn and real faces, with dynamic eye aversion and direct gaze transitions, and control stimuli (scrambled arrays and checkerboards) while continuous electroencephalographic (EEG) activity was recorded. EEG data from 2 temporo-occipital clusters of 9 electrodes in each hemisphere where N170 activity is known to be maximal were selected for analysis. N170 peak amplitude and latency, and temporal dynamics from Event-Related Spectral Perturbations (ERSPs) were measured in 16 healthy subjects. Real faces generated larger N170s for averted vs. direct gaze motion, however, N170s to real and direct gaze were as large as those to respective controls. N170 amplitude did not differ across line-drawn gaze changes. Overall, bilateral mean gamma power changes for faces relative to control stimuli occurred between 150-350 ms, potentially reflecting signal detection of facial motion. Our data indicate that experimental context does not drive N170 differences to viewed gaze changes. Low-level stimulus properties, such as the high sclera/iris contrast change in real eyes likely drive the N170 changes to viewed aversive movements.
Journal of neuroscience methods, Jan 13, 2014
In recent years, analyses of event related potentials/fields have moved from the selection of a f... more In recent years, analyses of event related potentials/fields have moved from the selection of a few components and peaks to a mass-univariate approach in which the whole data space is analyzed. Such extensive testing increases the number of false positives and correction for multiple comparisons is needed. Here we review all cluster-based correction for multiple comparison methods (cluster-height, cluster-size, cluster-mass, and threshold free cluster enhancement - TFCE), in conjunction with two computational approaches (permutation and bootstrap). Data driven Monte-Carlo simulations comparing two conditions within subjects (two sample Student's t-test) showed that, on average, all cluster-based methods using permutation or bootstrap alike control well the family-wise error rate (FWER), with a few caveats. (i) A minimum of 800 iterations are necessary to obtain stable results; (ii) below 50 trials, bootstrap methods are too conservative; (iii) for low critical family-wise error ...
The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, Jan 11, 2014
The human voice carries speech as well as important nonlinguistic signals that influence our soci... more The human voice carries speech as well as important nonlinguistic signals that influence our social interactions. Among these cues that impact our behavior and communication with other people is the perceived emotional state of the speaker. A theoretical framework for the neural processing stages of emotional prosody has suggested that auditory emotion is perceived in multiple steps (Schirmer and Kotz, 2006) involving low-level auditory analysis and integration of the acoustic information followed by higher-level cognition. Empirical evidence for this multistep processing chain, however, is still sparse. We examined this question using functional magnetic resonance imaging and a continuous carry-over design (Aguirre, 2007) to measure brain activity while volunteers listened to non-speech-affective vocalizations morphed on a continuum between anger and fear. Analyses dissociated neuronal adaptation effects induced by similarity in perceived emotional content between consecutive stimu...
Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2013
In the everyday environment, affective information is conveyed by both the face and the voice. St... more In the everyday environment, affective information is conveyed by both the face and the voice. Studies have demonstrated that a concurrently presented voice can alter the way that an emotional face expression is perceived, and vice versa, leading to emotional conflict if the information in the two modalities is mismatched. Additionally, evidence suggests that incongruence of emotional valence activates cerebral networks involved in conflict monitoring and resolution. However, it is currently unclear whether this is due to task difficulty-that incongruent stimuli are harder to categorize-or simply to the detection of mismatching information in the two modalities. The aim of the present fMRI study was to examine the neurophysiological correlates of processing incongruent emotional information, independent of task difficulty. Subjects were scanned while judging the emotion of face-voice affective stimuli. Both the face and voice were parametrically morphed between anger and happiness a...
Hierarchical processing of voices
Anatomical connectivity between face- and voice-selective cortex
NeuroImage, 2009
Audiovisual Integration of Face–Voice Gender Studied Using “Morphed Videos”
Seeing and Perceiving, 2011
Perception of faces and voices plays a prominent role in human social interaction, making multise... more Perception of faces and voices plays a prominent role in human social interaction, making multisensory integration of cross-modal speech a topic of great interest in cognitive neuroscience. How to define potential sites of multisensory integration using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is currently under debate, with three statistical criteria frequently used (e.g. super-additive, max and mean criteria). In the present fMRI study, 20 participants were scanned in a block design under three stimulus conditions: dynamic unimodal face, unimodal voice and bimodal face-voice. Using this single dataset, we examine all these statistical criteria in an attempt to define loci of face-voice integration. While the super-additive and mean criteria essentially revealed regions in which one of the unimodal responses was a deactivation, the max criteria appeared stringent and 1 only highlighted the left hippocampus as a potential site of face-voice integration. Psychophysiological interaction analysis showed that connectivity between occipital and temporal cortices increased during bimodal compared to unimodal conditions. We concluded that, when investigating multisensory integration with fMRI, all these criteria should be used in conjunction with manipulation of stimulus signal-to-noise ratio and/or cross-modal congruency.
Categorical perception of voice identity?
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2008
Journal of Neuroscience, 2014
The integration of emotional information from the face and voice of other persons is known to be ... more The integration of emotional information from the face and voice of other persons is known to be mediated by a number of "multisensory" cerebral regions, such as the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). However, whether multimodal integration in these regions is attributable to interleaved populations of unisensory neurons responding to face or voice or rather by multimodal neurons receiving input from the two modalities is not fully clear. Here, we examine this question using functional magnetic resonance adaptation and dynamic audiovisual stimuli in which emotional information was manipulated parametrically and independently in the face and voice via morphing between angry and happy expressions. Healthy human adult subjects were scanned while performing a happy/angry emotion categorization task on a series of such stimuli included in a fast event-related, continuous carryover design. Subjects integrated both face and voice information when categorizing emotion-although there was a greater weighting of face information-and showed behavioral adaptation effects both within and across modality. Adaptation also occurred at the neural level: in addition to modalityspecific adaptation in visual and auditory cortices, we observed for the first time a crossmodal adaptation effect. Specifically, fMRI signal in the right pSTS was reduced in response to a stimulus in which facial emotion was similar to the vocal emotion of the preceding stimulus. These results suggest that the integration of emotional information from face and voice in the pSTS involves a detectable proportion of bimodal neurons that combine inputs from visual and auditory cortices.
PLoS ONE, 2012
Humans can identify individuals from their voice, suggesting the existence of a perceptual repres... more Humans can identify individuals from their voice, suggesting the existence of a perceptual representation of voice identity. We used perceptual aftereffects -shifts in perceived stimulus quality after brief exposure to a repeated adaptor stimulusto further investigate the representation of voice identity in two experiments. Healthy adult listeners were familiarized with several voices until they reached a recognition criterion. They were then tested on identification tasks that used vowel stimuli generated by morphing between the different identities, presented either in isolation (baseline) or following short exposure to different types of voice adaptors (adaptation). Experiment 1 showed that adaptation to a given voice induced categorization shifts away from that adaptor's identity even when the adaptors consisted of vowels different from the probe stimuli. Moreover, original voices and caricatures resulted in comparable aftereffects, ruling out an explanation of identity aftereffects in terms of adaptation to low-level features. In Experiment 2, we show that adaptors with a disrupted configuration, i.e., altered fundamental frequency or formant frequencies, failed to produce perceptual aftereffects showing the importance of the preserved configuration of these acoustical cues in the representation of voices. These two experiments indicate a high-level, dynamic representation of voice identity based on the combination of several lower-level acoustical features into a specific voice configuration.
NeuroImage, 2006
We investigated the human face specificity by comparing the effects of inversion and contrast rev... more We investigated the human face specificity by comparing the effects of inversion and contrast reversal, two manipulations known to disrupt configural face processing, on human and ape faces, isolated eyes and objects, using event-related potentials. The face sensitive marker, N170, was shortest to human faces and delayed by inversion and contrast reversal for all categories and not only for human faces. Most importantly, N170 to inverted or contrast-reversed faces was not different from N170 to eyes that did not differ across manipulations. This suggests the disruption of facial configuration by these manipulations isolates the eye region from the face context, to which eye neurons respond. Our data suggest that (i) the inversion and contrast reversal effects on N170 latency are not specific to human faces and (ii) the similar increase of N170 amplitude by inversion and contrast reversal is unique to human faces and is driven by the eye region. Thus, while inversion and contrast reversal effects on N170 latency are not category-specific, their effects on amplitude are face-specific and reflect mainly the contribution of the eye region. D
NeuroImage, 2009
Social interactions involve more than ''just'' language. As important is a more primitive nonling... more Social interactions involve more than ''just'' language. As important is a more primitive nonlinguistic mode of communication acting in parallel with linguistic processes and driving our decisions to a much higher degree than is generally suspected. Amongst the ''honest signals'' that influence our behavior is perceived vocal attractiveness. Not only does vocal attractiveness reflect important biological characteristics of the speaker, it also influences our social perceptions according to the ''what sounds beautiful is good'' phenomenon. Despite the widespread influence of vocal attractiveness on social interactions revealed by behavioral studies, its neural underpinnings are yet unknown. We measured brain activity while participants listened to a series of vocal sounds (''ah'') and performed an unrelated task. We found that voice-sensitive auditory and inferior frontal regions were strongly correlated with implicitly perceived vocal attractiveness. While the involvement of auditory areas reflected the processing of acoustic contributors to vocal attractiveness (''distance to mean'' and spectrotemporal regularity), activity in inferior prefrontal regions (traditionally involved in speech processes) reflected the overall perceived attractiveness of the voices despite their lack of linguistic content. These results suggest the strong influence of hidden nonlinguistic aspects of communication signals on cerebral activity and provide an objective measure of this influence.
Auditory response of the Temporal Voice Areas (TVA) predicts memory performance for voices, but not bells
NeuroImage, 2009
fMRI investigations of voice identity perception
NeuroImage, 2009
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Papers by Marianne Latinus