Selective brain response to voices at four months of age
(2022) International Conference of Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON) — Location: Helsinki, Finland (18.May.2022)
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- Authors
Calce, Roberta Pia 
- et. al.
- Abstract
- Human voices are arguably among the most relevant sound in our daily life. Neuroimaging studies have demonstrated the existence of regions in the superior temporal sulcus- the “temporal voice areas” (TVAs)- that respond preferentially to voices vs other sounds in the human adult brain. However, how early in the developing brain such selective categorical response occurs remains poorly understood. In the present study, we investigate voice selective response in the infant's brain, relying on a Fast Periodic Auditory Stimulation (FPAS) paradigm combined with scalp electroencephalography (EEG). This approach provides an objective marker of the brain’s automatic ability to categorize vocal information with a high signal-to-noise ratio within a short testing duration. Twenty-three 4-month-old infants listened to a stream of heterogeneous sounds presented periodically to elicit a brain response at the same frequency in the EEG amplitude spectrum (3.33 Hz). Importantly, sequences were created so that voice stimuli appeared for each third sound (1.11 Hz). This voice presentation rate elicits an additional response in the EEG spectrum only in the case the brain discriminates voices from other sounds and generalizes across heterogeneous voice exemplars. Participants were also presented with a scrambled version of the stimuli with disrupted intelligibility but identical spectral content. We find no amplitude difference at the general rate of sound presentation (3.33 Hz) between the standard and the scrambled conditions. Crucially, we observed a peak in the EEG spectrum over the temporal channels at voice presentation rate (1.11 Hz) that is significantly reduced in the scrambled condition, suggesting that the spectral content associated with voices does not, alone, elicit the voice response. These results suggest that the infant brain successfully discriminates vocal stimuli versus non-vocal stimuli and generalizes them across heterogeneous exemplars, recognizing the voice excerpts as items of the same perceptual category. This study brings forth evidence of high-level voice categorization as early as four months of age.
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Calce, R. P., Rekow, D., Barbero, F., Kiseleva, A., Talwar, S., Leleu, A., Collignon, O., & et al. (2022). Selective brain response to voices at four months of age. International Conference of Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON), Helsinki, Finland. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/238387