Barbero, Francesca
[UCL]
Talwar, Siddharth
[UCL]
Calce, Roberta Pia
[UCL]
Rossion, Bruno
[Université de Lorraine]
Collignon, Olivier
[UCL]
Effective social communication depends on the integration of emotion expressions coming from the face and the voice. Although there are consistent reports on how seeing and hearing emotion expressions can support and influence each other, revealing a direct signature of multisensory integration non-invasively in humans remains challenging. In our study, we implemented a multi-input frequency tagging of electrophysiological (EEG) brain responses paradigm to investigate whether there are neuronal populations that simultaneously process and integrate facial and vocal emotion expressions. We acquired EEG recordings while participants attended to dynamic fearful facial and vocal expressions tagged at different frequencies (fV, fA). We were not only able to observe responses at the facial and vocal emotion presentation frequencies, but also at intermodulation frequencies (IMF) arising at the sums and differences of the harmonics of the stimulation frequencies (mfV ± nfA), suggesting integration of the visual and auditory emotion information into a unified representation. These IMF were not present in the stimulation and therefore arise only if common neuronal populations integrate signal from the two sensory streams. Importantly, IMF responses were absent in a control condition with mismatched facial and vocal emotion expressions. Our results provide direct and non-invasive evidence in humans in support for the existence of common neuronal populations that simultaneously process and integrate emotion information from the face and the voice.


Bibliographic reference |
Barbero, Francesca ; Talwar, Siddharth ; Calce, Roberta Pia ; Rossion, Bruno ; Collignon, Olivier. Common neural assemblies for facial and vocal emotion expressions as evidenced by intermodulation frequency EEG.International Multisensory Research Forum (IMRF) (Bruxelles, du 27/06/2023 au 30/06/2023). |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/283465 |