Abstract
For dynamic sounds, such as vocal expressions, duration often varies alongside speed. Compared to longer sounds, shorter sounds unfold more quickly. Here, we asked whether listeners implicitly use this confound when representing temporal regularities in their environment. In addition, we explored the role of emotions in this process. Using a mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm, we asked participants to watch a silent movie while passively listening to a stream of task-irrelevant sounds. In Experiment 1, one surprised and one neutral vocalization were compressed and stretched to create stimuli of 378 and 600 ms duration. Stimuli were presented in four blocks, two of which used surprised and two of which used neutral expressions. In one surprised and one neutral block, short and long stimuli served as standards and deviants, respectively. In the other two blocks, the assignment of standards and deviants was reversed. We observed a climbing MMN-like negativity shortly after deviant onset, which suggests that listeners implicitly track sound speed and detect speed changes. Additionally, this MMN-like effect emerged earlier and was larger for long than short deviants, suggesting greater sensitivity to duration increments or slowing down than to decrements or speeding up. Last, deviance detection was facilitated in surprised relative to neutral blocks, indicating that emotion enhances temporal processing. Experiment 2 was comparable to Experiment 1 with the exception that sounds were spectrally rotated to remove vocal emotional content. This abolished the emotional processing benefit, but preserved the other effects. Together, these results provide insights into listener sensitivity to sound speed and raise the possibility that speed biases duration judgements implicitly in a feed-forward manner. Moreover, this bias may be amplified for duration increments relative to decrements and within an emotional relative to a neutral stimulus context.
Highlights
The human temporal sense depends on the ability to represent external events marking the passage of time
Visual inspection of the event related potential (ERP) revealed a climbing negativity, in some cases preceded by a positive dip, over fronto-central electrodes with polarity inversion over the mastoids
In the context of an mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm, we observed a climbing MMN-like negativity emerging shortly after deviant onset
Summary
The human temporal sense depends on the ability to represent external events marking the passage of time. We explored brain responses to unattended neutral and emotional sounds that occasionally accelerated and decelerated, becoming shorter and longer as a consequence. Time Perception: On the Role of Stimulus Properties and Context. A sixth human sense, critically contributes to meaningful interactions with the environment. Language is temporally sensitive because the comprehension of words and syntactic dependencies relies on durational parameters such as voice-onset-time or intonation (Schirmer, 2004). In the context of non-verbal communication, timing tells us how long to hold another’s gaze, to laugh at another’s joke, and to wait for another’s response before responding in turn
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