Preliminary Evidence of Pre-Attentive Distinctions of Frequency-Modulated Tones that Convey Affect.

Recognizing emotion is an evolutionary imperative. An early stage of auditory scene analysis involves the perceptual grouping of acoustic features, which can be based on both temporal coincidence and spectral features such as perceived pitch. Perceived pitch, or fundamental frequency (F(0)), is an especially salient cue for differentiating affective intent through speech intonation (prosody).