Laboratory for Behavioural Neurology and Imaging of Cognition, Campus Biotech, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Pre-Surgical Epilepsy Evaluation Unit, Clinic of Neurology, University Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland.
Sci Rep. 2022 Oct 6;12(1):16754. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-20806-3.
Emotional prosody perception (EPP) unfolds in time given the intrinsic temporal nature of auditory stimuli, and has been shown to be modulated by spatial attention. Yet, the influence of temporal attention (TA) on EPP remains largely unexplored. TA studies manipulate subject's motor preparedness according to an upcoming event, with targets to discriminate during short attended trials arriving quickly, and, targets to discriminate during long unattended trials arriving at a later time point. We used here a classic paradigm manipulating TA to investigate its influence on behavioral responses to EPP (n = 100) and we found that TA bias was associated with slower reaction times (RT) for angry but not neutral prosodies and only during short trials. Importantly, TA biases were observed for accuracy measures only for angry voices and especially during short trials, suggesting that neutral stimuli are less subject to TA biases. Importantly, emotional facilitation, with faster RTs for angry voices in comparison to neutral voices, was observed when the stimuli were temporally attended and during short trials, suggesting an influential role of TA during EPP. Together, these results demonstrate for the first time the major influence of TA in RTs and behavioral performance while discriminating emotional prosody.
情感韵律感知 (EPP) 随着听觉刺激的固有时间性质而展开，并且已经被证明受到空间注意的调节。然而，时间注意 (TA) 对 EPP 的影响在很大程度上仍未得到探索。TA 研究根据即将发生的事件来操纵主体的运动准备，在短时间的注意试验中，目标会快速出现，而在长时间的非注意试验中，目标会在稍后的时间点出现。我们在这里使用了一种经典的范式来操纵 TA，以研究其对 EPP 的行为反应的影响（n=100），我们发现 TA 偏向与愤怒而非中性韵律的反应时间（RT）较慢有关，并且仅在短时间试验中如此。重要的是，仅在短时间试验中，对于愤怒的声音，而不是中性的声音，TA 偏差仅在准确性测量上可见，这表明中性刺激不太受 TA 偏差的影响。重要的是，当刺激受到时间关注并且在短时间试验中时，与中性声音相比，愤怒声音的 RT 更快，这表明 TA 在 EPP 中起着重要作用。总之，这些结果首次证明了 TA 在区分情感韵律时对 RT 和行为表现的主要影响。
