Memory for Voices: The Role of Attention

• Applicant: Dr. Romi Zäske
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 387517162

The human voice has predominantly been studied as a carrier of speech. However, successful interpersonal communication not only relies on the correct decoding of the linguistic content of a message, but also on the ability to extract non-linguistic social signals from the voice. Among the most important non-linguistic vocal cues are speaker gender, age, emotional state, and identity. Current models of person perception (Barton & Corrow, 2016) assume a modular and hierarchical organization of voice processing pathways. However, due to the focus on voice recognition of familiar speakers these models fail to explain (i) how representations of familiar voices are acquired during learning, or (ii) how non-linguistic cues other than identity, e.g. speaker gender, are represented in memory. Moreover, there is a current lack of research into the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the processing of non-linguistic vocal signals under various conditions of selective attention.To address the question to which extent memory representations for speaker identity and gender depend on the attentive processing of voices, I propose two strands of research with two experiments each (E1 to E4). Building upon our seminal findings on electrophysiological correlates of voice learning (Zäske, Volberg, Kovacs, & Schweinberger, 2014) strand one will investigate behavioural and electroencephalographic (EEG) markers of learning and recognizing newly learned voices under selective attention in healthy participants. Specifically, we will study effects of incidental vs. intentional encoding (E1) and of visual task load (E2) during learning on subsequent voice memory. Strand two investigates effects of spatial selective attention on voice memory in patients with impaired focus of spatial attention: to this end we assess behavioural effects of perceptual adaptation on the processing of voice gender in patients with spatial hemineglect (E3) and monaural tinnitus (E4). Overall, the proposed paradigms aim at a broad spectrum of selective attention tasks in order to span various listening conditions of daily relevance. I expect that the present studies will significantly contribute to our understanding of the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying voice memory as shaped by selective attention. Moreover, the patient studies may additionally contribute both to a better characterisation of two common clinical disorders and, prospectively, to the development of models and diagnostic tools for auditory attentional deficits in spatial hemineglect and tinnitus.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants