Sorting through the impact of familiarity when processing vocal identity: Results from a voice sorting task.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Stevenage SV
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7074657 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Apr
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Familiar and unfamiliar voice perception are often understood as being distinct from each other. For identity perception, theoretical work has proposed that listeners use acoustic information in different ways to perceive identity from familiar and unfamiliar voices: Unfamiliar voices are thought to be processed based on close comparisons of acoustic properties, while familiar voices are processed based on diagnostic acoustic features that activate a stored person-specific representation of that voice. To date no empirical study has directly examined whether and how familiar and unfamiliar listeners differ in their use of acoustic information for identity perception. Here, we tested this theoretical claim by linking listeners' judgements in voice identity tasks to complex acoustic representation - spectral similarity of the heard voice recordings. Participants (N = 177) who were either familiar or unfamiliar with a set of voices completed an identity discrimination task (Experiment 1) or an identity sorting task (Experiment 2). In both experiments, identity judgements for familiar and unfamiliar voices were guided by spectral similarity: Pairs of recordings with greater acoustic similarity were more likely to be perceived as belonging to the same voice identity. However, while there were no differences in how familiar and unfamiliar listeners used acoustic information for identity discrimination, differences were apparent for identity sorting. Our study therefore challenges proposals that view familiar and unfamiliar voice perception as being at all times distinct. Instead, our data suggest a critical role of the listening situation in which familiar and unfamiliar voices are evaluated, thus characterising voice identity perception as a highly dynamic process in which listeners opportunistically make use of any kind of information they can access.
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Project description:The voice is a marker of a person's identity which allows individual recognition even if the person is not in sight. Listening to a voice also affords inferences about the speaker's emotional state. Both these types of personal information are encoded in characteristic acoustic feature patterns analyzed within the auditory cortex. In the present study 16 volunteers listened to pairs of non-verbal voice stimuli with happy or sad valence in two different task conditions while event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded. In an emotion matching task, participants indicated whether the expressed emotion of a target voice was congruent or incongruent with that of a (preceding) prime voice. In an identity matching task, participants indicated whether or not the prime and target voice belonged to the same person. Effects based on emotion expressed occurred earlier than those based on voice identity. Specifically, P2 (approximately 200 ms)-amplitudes were reduced for happy voices when primed by happy voices. Identity match effects, by contrast, did not start until around 300 ms. These results show an early task-specific emotion-based influence on the early stages of auditory sensory processing.
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Project description:Blind people rely more on vocal cues when they recognize a person's identity than sighted people. Indeed, a number of studies have reported better voice recognition skills in blind than in sighted adults. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigated changes in the functional organization of neural systems involved in voice identity processing following congenital blindness. A group of congenitally blind individuals and matched sighted control participants were tested in a priming paradigm, in which two voice stimuli (S1, S2) were subsequently presented. The prime (S1) and the target (S2) were either from the same speaker (person-congruent voices) or from two different speakers (person-incongruent voices). Participants had to classify the S2 as either a old or a young person. Person-incongruent voices (S2) compared with person-congruent voices elicited an increased activation in the right anterior fusiform gyrus in congenitally blind individuals but not in matched sighted control participants. In contrast, only matched sighted controls showed a higher activation in response to person-incongruent compared with person-congruent voices (S2) in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus. These results provide evidence for crossmodal plastic changes of the person identification system in the brain after visual deprivation.
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Project description:Speech carries identity-diagnostic acoustic cues that help individuals recognize each other during vocal-social interactions. In humans, fundamental frequency, formant dispersion and harmonics-to-noise ratio serve as characteristics along which speakers can be reliably separated. The ability to infer a speaker's identity is also adaptive for members of other species (like companion animals) for whom humans (as owners) are relevant. The acoustic bases of speaker recognition in non-humans are unknown. Here, we tested whether dogs can recognize their owner's voice and whether they rely on the same acoustic parameters for such recognition as humans use to discriminate speakers. Stimuli were pre-recorded sentences spoken by the owner and control persons, played through loudspeakers placed behind two non-transparent screens (with each screen hiding a person). We investigated the association between acoustic distance of speakers (examined along several dimensions relevant in intraspecific voice identification) and dogs' behavior. Dogs chose their owner's voice more often than that of control persons', suggesting that they can identify it. Choosing success and time spent looking in the direction of the owner's voice were positively associated, showing that looking time is an index of the ease of choice. Acoustic distance of speakers in mean fundamental frequency and jitter were positively associated with looking time, indicating that the shorter the acoustic distance between speakers with regard to these parameters, the harder the decision. So, dogs use these cues to discriminate their owner's voice from unfamiliar voices. These findings reveal that dogs use some but probably not all acoustic parameters that humans use to identify speakers. Although dogs can detect fine changes in speech, their perceptual system may not be fully attuned to identity-diagnostic cues in the human voice.
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Project description:The ability to recognize an individual from their voice is a widespread ability with a long evolutionary history. Yet, the perceptual representation of familiar voices is ill-defined. In two experiments, we explored the neuropsychological processes involved in the perception of voice identity. We specifically explored the hypothesis that familiar voices (trained-to-familiar (Experiment 1), and famous voices (Experiment 2)) are represented as a whole complex pattern, well approximated by the average of multiple utterances produced by a single speaker. In experiment 1, participants learned three voices over several sessions, and performed a three-alternative forced-choice identification task on original voice samples and several "speaker averages," created by morphing across varying numbers of different vowels (e.g., [a] and [i]) produced by the same speaker. In experiment 2, the same participants performed the same task on voice samples produced by familiar speakers. The two experiments showed that for famous voices, but not for trained-to-familiar voices, identification performance increased and response times decreased as a function of the number of utterances in the averages. This study sheds light on the perceptual representation of familiar voices, and demonstrates the power of average in recognizing familiar voices. The speaker average captures the unique characteristics of a speaker, and thus retains the information essential for recognition; it acts as a prototype of the speaker.
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Project description:This meta-analysis compares the brain structures and mechanisms involved in facial and vocal emotion recognition. Neuroimaging studies contrasting emotional with neutral (face: N?=?76, voice: N?=?34) and explicit with implicit emotion processing (face: N?=?27, voice: N?=?20) were collected to shed light on stimulus and goal-driven mechanisms, respectively. Activation likelihood estimations were conducted on the full data sets for the separate modalities and on reduced, modality-matched data sets for modality comparison. Stimulus-driven emotion processing engaged large networks with significant modality differences in the superior temporal (voice-specific) and the medial temporal (face-specific) cortex. Goal-driven processing was associated with only a small cluster in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex for voices but not faces. Neither stimulus- nor goal-driven processing showed significant modality overlap. Together, these findings suggest that stimulus-driven processes shape activity in the social brain more powerfully than goal-driven processes in both the visual and the auditory domains. Yet, whereas faces emphasize subcortical emotional and mnemonic mechanisms, voices emphasize cortical mechanisms associated with perception and effortful stimulus evaluation (e.g. via subvocalization). These differences may be due to sensory stimulus properties and highlight the need for a modality-specific perspective when modeling emotion processing in the brain.
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Project description:BackgroundDysphonia influences the quality of life by interfering with communication. However, a laryngoscopic examination is expensive and not readily accessible in primary care units. Experienced laryngologists are required to achieve an accurate diagnosis.ObjectiveThis study sought to detect various vocal fold diseases through pathological voice recognition using artificial intelligence.MethodsWe collected 189 normal voice samples and 552 samples of individuals with voice disorders, including vocal atrophy (n=224), unilateral vocal paralysis (n=50), organic vocal fold lesions (n=248), and adductor spasmodic dysphonia (n=30). The 741 samples were divided into 2 sets: 593 samples as the training set and 148 samples as the testing set. A convolutional neural network approach was applied to train the model, and findings were compared with those of human specialists.ResultsThe convolutional neural network model achieved a sensitivity of 0.66, a specificity of 0.91, and an overall accuracy of 66.9% for distinguishing normal voice, vocal atrophy, unilateral vocal paralysis, organic vocal fold lesions, and adductor spasmodic dysphonia. Compared with the accuracy of human specialists, the overall accuracy rates were 60.1% and 56.1% for the 2 laryngologists and 51.4% and 43.2% for the 2 general ear, nose, and throat doctors.ConclusionsVoice alone could be used for common vocal fold disease recognition through a deep learning approach after training with our Mandarin pathological voice database. This approach involving artificial intelligence could be clinically useful for screening general vocal fold disease using the voice. The approach includes a quick survey and a general health examination. It can be applied during telemedicine in areas with primary care units lacking laryngoscopic abilities. It could support physicians when prescreening cases by allowing for invasive examinations to be performed only for cases involving problems with automatic recognition or listening and for professional analyses of other clinical examination results that reveal doubts about the presence of pathologies.
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Project description:Patients with voice impairment caused by advanced vocal fold (VF) fibrosis or tissue loss have few treatment options. A transplantable, bioengineered VF mucosa would address the individual and societal costs of voice-related communication loss. Such a tissue must be biomechanically capable of aerodynamic-to-acoustic energy transfer and high-frequency vibration and physiologically capable of maintaining a barrier against the airway lumen. We isolated primary human VF fibroblasts and epithelial cells and cocultured them under organotypic conditions. The resulting engineered mucosae showed morphologic features of native tissue, proteome-level evidence of mucosal morphogenesis and emerging extracellular matrix complexity, and rudimentary barrier function in vitro. When grafted into canine larynges ex vivo, the mucosae generated vibratory behavior and acoustic output that were indistinguishable from those of native VF tissue. When grafted into humanized mice in vivo, the mucosae survived and were well tolerated by the human adaptive immune system. This tissue engineering approach has the potential to restore voice function in patients with otherwise untreatable VF mucosal disease.
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