Dataset Information

Pupil dilation reflects the dynamic integration of audiovisual emotional speech.

ABSTRACT: Emotional speech perception is a multisensory process. When speaking with an individual we concurrently integrate the information from their voice and face to decode e.g., their feelings, moods, and emotions. However, the physiological reactions-such as the reflexive dilation of the pupil-associated to these processes remain mostly unknown. That is the aim of the current article, to investigate whether pupillary reactions can index the processes underlying the audiovisual integration of emotional signals. To investigate this question, we used an algorithm able to increase or decrease the smiles seen in a person's face or heard in their voice, while preserving the temporal synchrony between visual and auditory channels. Using this algorithm, we created congruent and incongruent audiovisual smiles, and investigated participants' gaze and pupillary reactions to manipulated stimuli. We found that pupil reactions can reflect emotional information mismatch in audiovisual speech. In our data, when participants were explicitly asked to extract emotional information from stimuli, the first fixation within emotionally mismatching areas (i.e., the mouth) triggered pupil dilation. These results reveal that pupil dilation can reflect the dynamic integration of audiovisual emotional speech and provide insights on how these reactions are triggered during stimulus perception.

SUBMITTER: Arias Sarah P

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10073148 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Pupil dilation reflects the dynamic integration of audiovisual emotional speech.

Arias Sarah Pablo P Hall Lars L Saitovitch Ana A Aucouturier Jean-Julien JJ Zilbovicius Monica M Johansson Petter P

Scientific reports 20230404 1

Emotional speech perception is a multisensory process. When speaking with an individual we concurrently integrate the information from their voice and face to decode e.g., their feelings, moods, and emotions. However, the physiological reactions-such as the reflexive dilation of the pupil-associated to these processes remain mostly unknown. That is the aim of the current article, to investigate whether pupillary reactions can index the processes underlying the audiovisual integration of emotiona ...[more]

PMID: 37016041

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Project description:ObjectivesThe listening demand incurred by speech perception fluctuates in normal conversation. At the acoustic-phonetic level, natural variation in pronunciation acts as speedbumps to accurate lexical selection. Any given utterance may be more or less phonetically ambiguous-a problem that must be resolved by the listener to choose the correct word. This becomes especially apparent when considering two common speech registers-clear and casual-that have characteristically different levels of phonetic ambiguity. Clear speech prioritizes intelligibility through hyperarticulation which results in less ambiguity at the phonetic level, while casual speech tends to have a more collapsed acoustic space. We hypothesized that listeners would invest greater cognitive resources while listening to casual speech to resolve the increased amount of phonetic ambiguity, as compared with clear speech. To this end, we used pupillometry as an online measure of listening effort during perception of clear and casual continuous speech in two background conditions: quiet and noise.DesignForty-eight participants performed a probe detection task while listening to spoken, nonsensical sentences (masked and unmasked) while recording pupil size. Pupil size was modeled using growth curve analysis to capture the dynamics of the pupil response as the sentence unfolded.ResultsPupil size during listening was sensitive to the presence of noise and speech register (clear/casual). Unsurprisingly, listeners had overall larger pupil dilations during speech perception in noise, replicating earlier work. The pupil dilation pattern for clear and casual sentences was considerably more complex. Pupil dilation during clear speech trials was slightly larger than for casual speech, across quiet and noisy backgrounds.ConclusionsWe suggest that listener motivation could explain the larger pupil dilations to clearly spoken speech. We propose that, bounded by the context of this task, listeners devoted more resources to perceiving the speech signal with the greatest acoustic/phonetic fidelity. Further, we unexpectedly found systematic differences in pupil dilation preceding the onset of the spoken sentences. Together, these data demonstrate that the pupillary system is not merely reactive but also adaptive-sensitive to both task structure and listener motivation to maximize accurate perception in a limited resource system.

Dataset Information

Pupil dilation reflects the dynamic integration of audiovisual emotional speech.

Publications

Pupil dilation reflects the dynamic integration of audiovisual emotional speech.

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