Abstract
Emotional stimuli have been shown to modulate attentional orienting through signals sent by subcortical brain regions that modulate visual perception at early stages of processing. Fewer studies, however, have investigated a similar effect of emotional stimuli on attentional orienting in the auditory domain together with an investigation of brain regions underlying such attentional modulation, which is the general aim of the present study. Therefore, we used an original auditory dot-probe paradigm involving simultaneously presented neutral and angry non-speech vocal utterances lateralized to either the left or the right auditory space, immediately followed by a short and lateralized single sine wave tone presented in the same (valid trial) or in the opposite space as the preceding angry voice (invalid trial). Behavioral results showed an expected facilitation effect for target detection during valid trials while functional data showed greater activation in the middle and posterior superior temporal sulci (STS) and in the medial frontal cortex for valid vs. invalid trials. The use of reaction time facilitation [absolute value of the Z-score of valid-(invalid+neutral)] as a group covariate extended enhanced activity in the amygdalae, auditory thalamus, and visual cortex. Taken together, our results suggest the involvement of a large and distributed network of regions among which the STS, thalamus, and amygdala are crucial for the decoding of angry prosody, as well as for orienting and maintaining attention within an auditory space that was previously primed by a vocal emotional event.
Highlights
While animals such as mammals and birds use vocalizations to communicate with other conspecifics, humans tend to communicate by relying mainly on speech
Neuroimaging Results of Spatially Matching/Non-matching Prosody Cues and Tone Target In order to interpret our behavioral results in terms of specific brain regions underlying an attentional facilitation effect, we relied on specific contrasts, notably valid compared with invalid trials and valid compared with invalid trials when taking into account the space of presentation of the stimuli
superior temporal sulci (STS) regions showed an enhanced BOLD signal for valid compared with invalid trials, while a smaller decrease of activation was observed in the medial frontal gyrus (MedFG) for valid compared with invalid trials
Summary
While animals such as mammals and birds use vocalizations to communicate with other conspecifics, humans tend to communicate by relying mainly on speech. For this reason, speech and language are the subject of numerous studies in psychology and cognitive neuroscience (Hickok and Poeppel, 2007), whereas prosody— emotional prosody—has been less studied. The term prosody refers to the unfolding of the pitch and intensity of the human voice, as well as other specific features of voice quality (Scherer, 1986; Patel et al, 2011). The relative underrepresentation of the study of emotional prosody in the literature is rather surprising since the ability to accurately decode it in everyday life is important for human communication.
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