Leonardo Ceravolo

University of Geneva | UNIGE · School of Psychology

The accurate estimation of the proximity of threat is important for biological survival and to assess relevant events of everyday life. We addressed the question of whether proximal as compared to distal vocal threat would lead to a perceptual advantage for the perceiver. Accordingly, we sought to highlight the neural mechanisms underlying the perc...

To better define the underlying brain network for the decoding of emotional prosody, we recorded high-resolution brain scans during an implicit and explicit decoding task of angry and neutral prosody. Several subregions in the right superior temporal gyrus (STG) and bilateral in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) were sensitive to emotional prosody....

Our understanding of the role played by the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in human emotion has recently advanced with STN deep brain stimulation, a neurosurgical treatment for Parkinson's disease and obsessive-compulsive disorder. However, the potential presence of several confounds related to pathological models raises the question of how much they af...

Despite a large body of literature on the psychological and brain mechanisms of vocal emotion perception, less is known on expression and production mechanisms, especially the vibrations originating in the vocal cords and their role in emotional voice production. In the present study, we aimed to fill this gap. Participants had to produce angry, ha...

Introduction The ability to process verbal language seems unique to humans and relies not only on semantics but on other forms of communication such as affective vocalizations, that we share with other primate species—particularly great apes (Hominidae). Methods To better understand these processes at the behavioral and brain level, we asked human...

The ability to process verbal language seems unique to humans and relies not only on semantics but on other forms of communication such as affective vocalisations, that we share with other primate species—particularly great apes (Hominidae). To better understand these processes at the behavioural and brain level, we asked human participants to cate...

Vocal emotion recognition, a key determinant to analyzing a speaker’s emotional state, is known to be impaired following cerebellar dysfunctions. Nevertheless, its possible functional integration in the large-scale brain network subtending emotional prosody recognition has yet to be explored. We administered an emotional prosody recognition task to...

Introduction Emotional prosody is defined as suprasegmental and segmental changes in the human voice and related acoustic parameters that can inform the listener about the emotional state of the speaker. While the processing of emotional prosody is well represented in the literature, the mechanism of embodied cognition in emotional voice perception...

Many species, including humans and non-human primates, react differently to threatening or pleasant situations. Because of its adaptiveness, recognizing affective signals is likely to be reflected in a capability of modern humans to recognize other closely related species call content. However, at both behavioural and neural levels, only few studie...

The evaluation of socio-affective sound information is accomplished, among other brain regions, by the primate neural auditory cortex in collaboration with limbic and inferior frontal brain nodes. For the latter, activity in inferior frontal cortex (IFC) is often observed during the classification (e.g., categorization) of voice sounds, especially...

The evaluation of socio-affective sound information is accomplished by the primate neural auditory cortex in collaboration with limbic and inferior frontal brain nodes. For the latter, activity in inferior frontal cortex (IFC) is often observed during classification of voice sounds, especially if they carry affective information. Partly opposing vi...

Until recently, brain networks underlying emotional voice prosody decoding and processing were focused on modulations in primary and secondary auditory, ventral frontal and prefrontal cortices, and the amygdala. Growing interest for a specific role of the basal ganglia and cerebellum was recently brought into the spotlight. In the present study, we...

Integrating and predicting the intentions and actions of others are critical components of social interactions, but the behavioral and neural bases of such mechanisms under altered perceptual conditions are poorly understood. In the present study, we recruited expert violinists and age-matched controls with no musical training and asked them to eva...

Integrating and predicting intentions and actions of others are crucial components of social interactions, but the behavioral and neural underpinnings of such mechanisms in altered perceptual conditions remain poorly understood. We demonstrated that expertise was necessary to successfully understand and evaluate communicative intent in spatially an...

Until recently, brain networks underlying emotional voice prosody decoding and processing were focused on modulations in primary and secondary auditory, ventral frontal and prefrontal cortices, and the amygdala. Growing interest for a specific role of the basal ganglia and cerebellum was recently brought into the spotlight. In the present study, we...

In recent years, research on voice processing, particularly the study of temporal voice areas (TVA), was dedicated almost exclusively to human voice. To characterize commonalities and differences regarding primate vocalization representations in the human brain, the inclusion of closely related primates, especially chimpanzees and bonobos, is neede...

Functional Near-Infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a neuroimaging tool that has been recently used in a variety of cognitive paradigms. Yet, it remains unclear whether fNIRS is suitable to study complex cognitive processes such as categorization or discrimination. Previously, functional imaging has suggested a role of both inferior frontal cortices i...

Coordination between individuals supplies humans with an immense advantage regarding social and professional collaboration, biological evolution and survival. Communicative intent promotes fruitful coordination. It was the subject of the present study in both expert violinists and control participants. The results provide new insights into the gene...

Variations of the vocal tone of the voice during speech production, known as prosody, provide information about the emotional state of the speaker. In recent years, functional imaging has suggested a role of both right and left inferior frontal cortices in attentive decoding and cognitive evaluation of emotional cues in human vocalizations. Here, w...

Salient vocalizations, especially aggressive voices, are believed to attract attention due to an automatic threat detection system. However, studies assessing the temporal dynamics of auditory spatial attention to aggressive voices are missing. Using event-related potential markers of auditory spatial attention (N2ac and LPCpc), we show that attent...

Speech perception has been the focus of innumerable studies over the past decades. While our abilities to recognize individuals by their voice state plays a central role in our everyday social interactions, limited scientific attention has been devoted to the perceptual and cerebral mechanisms underlying nonverbal information processing in voices.

The past decades have seen an explosion of research into the psychological, cognitive, neural, biological, and technical mechanisms of voice perception. These mechanisms refer to the general ability to extract information from voices expressed by other living beings or by technical systems. Voice perception research is now a lively area of research...

Emotional situations are typically better remembered than neutral situations, but the psychological conditions and brain mechanisms underlying this effect remain debated. Stimulus valence and affective arousal have been suggested to explain the major role of emotional stimuli in memory facilitation. However, neither valence nor arousal are sufficie...

Salient vocalizations, especially aggressive voices, are believed to attract attention due to an automatic threat detection system. However, studies assessing the temporal dynamics of auditory spatial attention to aggressive voices are missing. Using event-related potential markers of auditory spatial attention (N2ac and LPCpc), we show that attent...

Different parts of our brain code the perceptual features and actions related to an object, causing a binding problem, in which the brain has to integrate information related to an event without any interference regarding the features and actions involved in other concurrently processed events. Using a paradigm similar to Hommel, who revealed perce...

Perceptual decision-making on emotions involves gathering sensory information about the affective state of another person and forming a decision on the likelihood of a particular state. These perceptual decisions can be of varying complexity as determined by different contexts. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and a region of interest...

The present study investigated the extent to which luxury vs. non-luxury brand labels (i.e., extrinsic cues) randomly assigned to items and preferences for these items impact choice, and how this impact may be moderated by materialistic tendencies (i.e., individual characteristics). The main objective was to investigate the neural correlates of abo...

Functional brain networks involved in voice processing

Our brain codes the features of perceptual events in a distributed fashion, raising the question of how information belonging to an event is processed without any interference of features from other events. Hommel[1] suggested the existence of an episodic memory trace that could bind together perceptual features and actions related to an event. Usi...

Emotional stimuli have been shown to modulate attentional orienting through signals sent by subcortical brain regions that modulate visual perception at early stages of processing. Fewer studies, however, have investigated a similar effect of emotional stimuli on attentional orienting in the auditory domain together with an investigation of brain r...

Processing of perceptual features and motor actions in a distributed fashion causes a binding problem: how does the brain integrate the information belonging to an event without any interference of features from other concurrently processed events? Hommel[1] suggested the “event file” concept: an episodic memory trace binding together perceptual fe...