Department for General Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Institute of Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Am Steiger 3/1, D-07743 Jena, Germany.
Hear Res. 2011 Dec;282(1-2):283-8. doi: 10.1016/j.heares.2011.06.008. Epub 2011 Jul 13.
High-level adaptation not only biases the perception of faces, but also causes transient distortions in auditory perception of non-linguistic voice information about gender, identity, and emotional intonation. Here we report a novel auditory aftereffect in perceiving vocal age: age estimates were elevated in age-morphed test voices when preceded by adaptor voices of young speakers (∼20 yrs), compared to old adaptor voices (∼70 yrs). This vocal age aftereffect (VAAE) complements a recently reported face aftereffect (Schweinberger et al., 2010) and points to selective neuronal coding of vocal age. Intriguingly, post-adaptation assessment revealed that VAAEs could persist for minutes after adaptation, although reduced in magnitude. As an important qualification, VAAEs during post-adaptation were modulated by gender congruency between speaker and listener. For both male and female listeners, VAAEs were much reduced for test voices of opposite gender. Overall, this study establishes a new auditory aftereffect in the perception of vocal age. We offer a tentative sociobiological explanation for the differential, gender-dependent recovery from vocal age adaptation.
高水平的适应不仅会影响对人脸的感知，还会导致对非语言声音信息的性别、身份和情感语调的听觉感知产生短暂的扭曲。在这里，我们报告了一种新的听觉后效，即在感知声音年龄时：与使用老年适应者（约 70 岁）的适应者声音相比，当被年轻说话者（约 20 岁）的适应者声音预先出现时，对测试声音的年龄估计会升高。这种声音年龄后效（VAAE）补充了最近报告的面孔后效（Schweinberger 等人，2010），并指向声音年龄的选择性神经元编码。有趣的是，适应后的评估表明，VAAE 可以在适应后持续几分钟，但幅度减小。作为一个重要的限定条件，适应后的 VAAE 受到说话者和听众之间性别一致性的调节。对于男性和女性听众来说，对于相反性别的测试声音，VAAE 会大大减少。总体而言，这项研究确立了对声音年龄感知的新的听觉后效。我们提供了一个关于从声音年龄适应中恢复的差异的社会生物学解释，这种恢复是基于性别差异的。
