Abstract
It is widely accepted that the perception of human voices is supported by neural structures located along the superior temporal sulci. However, there is an ongoing discussion to what extent the activations found in fMRI studies are evoked by the vocal features themselves or are the result of phonetic processing. To show that the temporal lobes are indeed engaged in voice processing, short utterances spoken by famous and unknown people were presented to healthy young participants whose task it was to identify the familiar speakers. In two event-related fMRI experiments, the temporal lobes were found to differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar voices such that named voices elicited higher BOLD signal intensities than unfamiliar voices. Yet, the temporal cortices did not only discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar voices. Experiment 2, which required overtly spoken responses and allowed to distinguish between four familiarity grades, revealed that there was a fine-grained differentiation between all of these familiarity levels with higher familiarity being associated with larger BOLD signal amplitudes. Finally, we observed a gradual response change such that the BOLD signal differences between unfamiliar and highly familiar voices increased with the distance of an area from the transverse temporal gyri, especially towards the anterior temporal cortex and the middle temporal gyri. Therefore, the results suggest that (the anterior and non-superior portions of) the temporal lobes participate in voice-specific processing independent from phonetic components also involved in spoken speech material.
Highlights
IntroductionIt was suggested that areas in the temporal lobes are involved in the processing of other person’s voices
Some years ago, it was suggested that areas in the temporal lobes are involved in the processing of other person’s voices
Two slow event-related fMRI experiments were performed with the aim to analyse the neural activity in the temporal lobes in response to familiar human voices
Summary
It was suggested that areas in the temporal lobes are involved in the processing of other person’s voices. It was found that the perception of such voices evoked widespread neural activation bilaterally in the superior and middle temporal cortex of the human brain when these stimuli were contrasted with rest periods [1], with the perception of faces [2,3], or with meaningless acoustic control stimuli [2,4,5,6]. That the anterior STG and areas along the STS are of significance for voice processing is supported by studies that compared the perception of human voices and meaningful environmental sounds In those studies, activations peaks were predominantly located in the upper bank of the STS all along its horizontal length [4,7,8]. As these areas preferentially responded to human voices, they were termed ‘voice-selective areas’ [7]
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