Cortical tracking of speakers' spectral changes predicts selective listening.

A social scene is particularly informative when people are distinguishable. To understand somebody amid a "cocktail party" chatter, we automatically index their voice. This ability is underpinned by parallel processing of vocal spectral contours from speech sounds, but it has not yet been established how this occurs in the brain's cortex.

Event-related potentials of social comparisons in depression and social anxiety.

Social comparison is central in human life and can be especially challenging in depression and social anxiety. We assessed event-related potentials and emotions using a social comparison task in which participants received feedback on both their own and a co-player's performance, in participants with depression and/or social anxiety (n = 63) and healthy controls (n = 72). Participants reported more negative emotions for downward (being better than the co-player [participant correct, co-player wrong]) and upward (being worse than the co-player [participant wrong, co-player correct]) comparisons versus even outcomes, with these effects being stronger in depression and social anxiety.

Visuospatial attention revamps cortical processing of sound amid audiovisual uncertainty.

Selective attentional biases arising from one sensory modality manifest in others. The effects of visuospatial attention, important in visual object perception, are unclear in the auditory domain during audiovisual (AV) scene processing. We investigate temporal and spatial factors that underlie such transfer neurally.

Event-related potentials during the ultimatum game in people with symptoms of depression and/or social anxiety.

Depression and social anxiety are common disorders that have a profound impact on social functioning. The need for studying the neural substrates of social interactions in mental disorders using interactive tasks has been emphasized. The field of neuroeconomics, which combines neuroscience techniques and behavioral economics multiplayer tasks such as the Ultimatum Game (UG), can contribute in this direction.

Neural processing of iterated prisoner's dilemma outcomes indicates next-round choice and speed to reciprocate cooperation.

The iterated prisoner's dilemma (iPD) game is a well-established model for testing how people cooperate, and the neural processes that unfold after its distinct outcomes have been partly described. Recent theoretical models suggest evolution favors intuitive cooperation, which raises questions on the behavioral but also neural timelines involved. We studied the outcome/feedback stage of iPD rounds with electroencephalography (EEG) methods.

Restoration and Efficiency of the Neural Processing of Continuous Speech Are Promoted by Prior Knowledge.

Sufficiently noisy listening conditions can completely mask the acoustic signal of significant parts of a sentence, and yet listeners may still report the perception of hearing the masked speech. This occurs even when the speech signal is removed entirely, if the gap is filled with stationary noise, a phenomenon known as perceptual restoration. At the neural level, however, it is unclear the extent to which the neural representation of missing extended speech sequences is similar to the dynamic neural representation of ordinary continuous speech.

Dynamic cortical representations of perceptual filling-in for missing acoustic rhythm.

In the phenomenon of perceptual filling-in, missing sensory information can be reconstructed via interpolation or extrapolation from adjacent contextual cues by what is necessarily an endogenous, not yet well understood, neural process. In this investigation, sound stimuli were chosen to allow observation of fixed cortical oscillations driven by contextual (but missing) sensory input, thus entirely reflecting endogenous neural activity. The stimulus employed was a 5 Hz frequency-modulated tone, with brief masker probes (noise bursts) occasionally added.

The role of sensitivity to transients in the detection of appearing and disappearing objects in complex acoustic scenes.

We report a series of psychophysics experiments that investigated listeners' sensitivity to changes in complex acoustic scenes. Specifically, we sought to test the hypothesis that change detection is supported by sensitivity to change-related transients (an abrupt change in stimulus power within a certain frequency band, associated with the appearance or disappearance of a scene element). This hypothesis, in the context of natural scenes, is commonly dismissed on account that the elements of the scene may themselves be characterized by on-going energy fluctuations that would mask any genuine change-related transients.

Detection of appearing and disappearing objects in complex acoustic scenes.

The ability to detect sudden changes in the environment is critical for survival. Hearing is hypothesized to play a major role in this process by serving as an "early warning device," rapidly directing attention to new events. Here, we investigate listeners' sensitivity to changes in complex acoustic scenes-what makes certain events "pop-out" and grab attention while others remain unnoticed? We use artificial "scenes" populated by multiple pure-tone components, each with a unique frequency and amplitude modulation rate.