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MMN responses during implicit processing of changes in emotional prosody: an ERP study using Chinese pseudo-syllables

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Abstract

In this study, we tested the underlying mechanisms of early emotional prosody perception, especially examined whether change detection in oddball paradigm was caused by emotional category and physical properties. Using implicit oddball paradigms, the current study manipulated the cues for detecting deviant stimuli from standards in three conditions: the simultaneous changes in emotional category and physical properties (EP condition), change in emotional category alone (E condition), and change in physical properties alone (P condition). ERP results revealed that physical property change increased brain responses to deviant stimuli in the EP than in the E condition at early stage 90–160 ms, suggesting that physical property change of emotional sounds can also be detected at the early stage. At the later stage 160–260 ms, the simultaneous and respective changes in emotional category and physical properties were reliably detected, and the sum of the brain responses to the corresponding changes in E and P conditions was equal to the brain responses to the simultaneous changes in EP condition. Source analysis further revealed that stimuli-driven regions (inferior parietal lobule), temporal and frontal cortices were activated at early stage, while only frontal cortices for higher cognitive processing were activated at later stage. These findings suggest that emotional prosody changes in physical properties and emotion category are perceived as domain-general change information in emotional prosody perception.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (31070989), Open Research Fund of the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning (CNKOPYB0909). The authors would like to thank Xuhai Chen and Shuzhen Gan for data collection and discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 16 Lincui Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100101, China

    Aishi Jiang, Jianfeng Yang & Yufang Yang

  2. Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Aishi Jiang

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  1. Aishi Jiang
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  2. Jianfeng Yang
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  3. Yufang Yang
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Correspondence to Yufang Yang.

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Jiang, A., Yang, J. & Yang, Y. MMN responses during implicit processing of changes in emotional prosody: an ERP study using Chinese pseudo-syllables. Cogn Neurodyn 8, 499–508 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-014-9303-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-014-9303-3

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