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schall_diss.pdf (Publisher version), 547KB
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schall_diss.pdf
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Face and voice of a person are strongly associated with each other and usually perceived
as a single entity. Despite the natural co-occurrence of faces and voices, brain research has
traditionally approached their perception from a unisensory perspective. This means that
research into face perception has exclusively focused on the visual system, while research
into voice perception has exclusively probed the auditory system. In this thesis, I suggest
that the brain has adapted to the multisensory nature of faces and voices and that this
adaptation is evident even when one input stream is missing, that is, when input is actually
unisensory. Specifically, the current work investigates how the brain exploits previously
learned voice-face associations to optimize the auditory processing of voices and vocal
speech. Three empirical studies providing spatiotemporal brain data—via functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG)—constitute this
thesis. All data were acquired while participants listened to auditory-only speech samples
of previously familiarized speakers (with or without seeing the speakers’ faces). Three key
findings demonstrate that previously learned visual speaker information support the
auditory analysis of vocal sounds: (i) face-sensitive areas were part of the sensory network
activated by voices, (ii) the auditory analysis of voices was temporally facilitated by learned
facial associations and (iii) multisensory interactions between face- and voice/speech-
sensitive regions were increased. The current work challenges traditional unisensory views
on vocal perception and rather suggests that voice and vocal speech perception profit
from a multisensory neural processing scheme.
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