Where Sounds Occur Matters: Context Effects Influence Processing of Salient Vocalisations.

Atiqah Azhari,Marc H Bornstein,Gianluca Esposito,Paola Rigo

doi:10.3390/brainsci10070429

Abstract

The social context in which a salient human vocalisation is heard shapes the affective information it conveys. However, few studies have investigated how visual contextual cues lead to differential processing of such vocalisations. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is implicated in processing of contextual information and evaluation of saliency of vocalisations. Using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), we investigated PFC responses of young adults (N = 18) to emotive infant and adult vocalisations while they passively viewed the scenes of two categories of environmental contexts: a domestic environment (DE) and an outdoors environment (OE). Compared to a home setting (DE) which is associated with a fixed mental representation (e.g., expect seeing a living room in a typical house), the outdoor setting (OE) is more variable and less predictable, thus might demand greater processing effort. From our previous study in Azhari et al. (2018) that employed the same experimental paradigm, the OE context was found to elicit greater physiological arousal compared to the DE context. Similarly, we hypothesised that greater PFC activation will be observed when salient vocalisations are paired with the OE compared to the DE condition. Our finding supported this hypothesis: the left rostrolateral PFC, an area of the brain that facilitates relational integration, exhibited greater activation in the OE than DE condition which suggests that greater cognitive resources are required to process outdoor situational information together with salient vocalisations. The result from this study bears relevance in deepening our understanding of how contextual information differentially modulates the processing of salient vocalisations.

Highlights

From laughter to cries, the human experience is characterised by a plethora of emotional vocalisations of varying affective prosody that serve to convey a wealth of information [1,2].Classical theories of emotions are founded on the belief that vocalisations relay discrete universally recognised emotions [3,4]
Pairwise comparisons showed greater cerebral activation to sounds in the outdoor environment (OE) as compared to the domestic environment (DE) condition in CH11, which corresponds to the left RLPFC
We tested the hypothesis that contextual scenes that depicted the outdoor environment (OE) would elicit greater activation of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) compared to scenes of the domestic environment (DE), when paired with salient vocalisations

Summary

Introduction

The human experience is characterised by a plethora of emotional vocalisations of varying affective prosody that serve to convey a wealth of information [1,2]. Classical theories of emotions are founded on the belief that vocalisations relay discrete universally recognised emotions [3,4]. Cries are commonly thought to automatically invoke sadness, and laughter to excite joy [5]. The realisation that vocalisations rarely occur in a social void has led to an emerging understanding of how contexts moderate the interpretation of emotional vocalisations. Context serves as a framing backdrop against which we derive situationally relevant meaning from our sensory experiences [6]. Brain Sci. 2020, 10, 429; doi:10.3390/brainsci10070429 www.mdpi.com/journal/brainsci

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion