Search Results (21)

Background: Attractiveness plays an important role in social interactions. However, it remains unclear whether presenting attractiveness information across multiple sensory modalities facilitates attractiveness evaluation, and how cross-modal congruency modulates this process. Methods: The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate these questions. Participants judged the attractiveness of voices presented alone or paired with faces that were congruent or incongruent in attractiveness. Results: Significant differences were found between unimodal and audiovisual conditions, as well as between congruent and incongruent pairs, during both early perceptual (N1) and later evaluative (P3) stages. Both audiovisual conditions elicited larger N1 amplitudes than the auditory-only condition, and congruent pairs produced larger N1 amplitudes than incongruent pairs. At a later stage, the auditory-only condition produced larger P3 amplitudes than the audiovisual conditions. Furthermore, the interaction between voice attractiveness and visual context on P3 amplitudes was significant. Audiovisual incongruent pairs elicited larger P3 amplitudes than congruent pairs, but only when the voice was unattractive. Conclusions: The results demonstrate that redundant visual cues of attractiveness both accelerate and alter the perception of auditory attractiveness. These audiovisual integration effects occur across different processing stages and may reflect enhanced processing efficiency in multisensory social perception. Full article

Background/Objectives: Change detection of social cues across individuals plays an important role in human interaction. Methods: Here we investigated the automatic change detection of facial and vocal attractiveness in 19 female participants by recording event-related potentials (ERPs). We adopted a ‘deviant-standard-reverse’ oddball paradigm where high- or low-attractive items were embedded as deviants in a sequence of opposite attractive standard stimuli. Results: Both high- and low-attractive faces and voices elicited mismatch negativities (MMNs). Furthermore, low-attractive versus high-attractive items induced larger mismatch negativities in the voice condition but larger P3 amplitudes in the face condition. Conclusions: These data indicate that attractiveness can be automatically detected but that differences exist between facial and vocal attractiveness processing. Generally, change detection seems to work better for unattractive than attractive information, possibly in line with a negativity bias. Full article

Background: Previous research has found an association between attractiveness and personality traits, but the neural mechanisms are largely unknown. Method: We used a Stroop-like paradigm combined with EEG recordings to investigate how personality traits affect the perception of facial and vocal attractiveness. Twenty-three female participants classified the attractiveness of male faces and male voices paired with positive or negative personality trait words. Results: The behavioral results indicate that personality trait words that are semantically congruent with attractiveness levels facilitate the perception of attractiveness, whereas incongruent trait information produces the opposite effect. Event-related potentials revealed that the influence of personality trait words on facial attractiveness was primarily related to motivated attention as indicated by the late positive component. In the voice task, personality trait words impacted vocal attractiveness processing first during semantic integration (N400 component) and then modulated motivated attention. Conclusions: These results suggest that alleged personality traits modify attractiveness processing in faces and voices in relatively late and partially modality-specific stages. Full article

Historically, the field of discourse marker research has moved from relying on intuition to more and more ecological data, with written, spoken, and now multimodal corpora available to study these pervasive pragmatic devices. For some topics, video is necessary to capture the complexity of interactive phenomena, such as feedback in dialogue. Feedback is the process of communicating engagement, alignment, and affiliation (or lack thereof) to the other speaker, and has attracted a lot of attention recently, from fields such as psycholinguistics, conversation analysis, or second language acquisition. Feedback can be expressed by a variety of verbal/vocal and visual/gestural devices, from questions to head nods and, crucially, discourse or pragmatic markers such as “okay, alright, yeah”. Verbal-vocal and visual-gestural forms often co-occur, which calls for more investigation of their combinations. In this study, we analyze multimodal pragmatic markers of feedback in a corpus of French dialogues, where all feedback devices have previously been categorized into either “alignment” (expression of mutual understanding) or “affiliation” (expression of shared stance). After describing the distribution and forms within each modality taken separately, we will focus on interesting multimodal combinations, such as [negative oui ‘yes’ + head tilt] or [mais oui ‘but yes’ + forward head move], thus showing how the visual modality can affect the semantics of verbal markers. In doing so, we will contribute to defining multimodal pragmatic markers, a status which has so far been restricted to verbal markers and manual gestures, at the expense of other devices in the visual modality. Full article

This study examined the impact of males’ facial and vocal attractiveness, as well as social interest in females’ decision-making in a trust game. The results showed that trustees with attractive faces or expressing positive social interest were more likely to receive initial investments. Trustees with attractive voices also received more initial investments than unattractive ones in most conditions, except when they had attractive faces and positive interest. Moreover, participants reinvest in trustees with attractive faces or voices, even if they withheld repayment. However, trustees with positive interest would receive more reinvestment only when they reciprocated. In addition, trusters expressing positive social interest were expected to invest and earn repayment at higher rates. Nonetheless, trusters with attractive faces (or voices) were only expected to invest at higher rates when they had attractive voices (or faces) and negative interest. These findings suggest that beauty premium is modulated by participants’ roles, such that the effect of beauty would be stronger when participants encounter trustees rather than trusters. Positive social interest is a perk in most conditions, except when trustees withheld repayment. Full article

Facial attractiveness, vocal attractiveness, and social interest influence two-person decision making. However, it remains unclear how these three factors jointly influence three-person bargaining. We investigated the impact of facial attractiveness, vocal attractiveness, and social interest on fairness decisions in a three-person ultimatum game and a third-party punishment dictator game. The results of the ultimatum game showed that in the condition of positive social interest, the acceptance rate of unfair/fair offers was higher when third players had attractive faces or attractive voices. Attractive faces of third players also increased acceptance rates of unfair/unfair offers than unattractive faces when third players expressed negative social interest. In the third-party punishment game, participants rated unfair allocations from unattractive-voice proposers with attractive faces (compared to unattractive faces) and proposers who expressed negative social interest (compared to positive social interest) as more reasonable. Regarding the punishment intentions, among the three factors, both the effect of vocal attractiveness and social interest were modulated by the combinations of the other two factors, while the effect of facial attractiveness remains robust across all conditions. These findings suggest that fairness decisions in three-person bargaining games are affected by beauty premium and social interest, while these effects vary across different decision contexts. Full article

Crowdfunding videos have become a crucial tool for entrepreneurs seeking financial support, with audio design playing a critical role in attracting potential investors. However, research on how audio features influence crowdfunding success remains limited. This study uses audio analysis techniques to examine data from 4500 crowdfunding campaigns on the Kickstarter platform between 2013 and 2016, investigating the impact of audio features on crowdfunding success rates. Grounded in the signaling theory, we posited four hypotheses suggesting that speech rate, loudness, pitch, and emotional arousal would each exhibit an inverted U-shaped relationship with crowdfunding success rates. Through data analysis, we found that moderate levels of speech rate, loudness, pitch, and emotional arousal significantly enhanced crowdfunding success, whereas extremes in these vocal characteristics had a detrimental effect. Our findings not only extend the application of audio analysis in the crowdfunding domain, but also provide empirical evidence for the influence of audio features on crowdfunding success. This research offers practical guidance for project initiators in developing promotional strategies and for platforms in optimizing user experience. Full article

Background/Objectives: The interest in processing human speech and other human-generated audio signals as a diagnostic tool has increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project OSCAR (vOice Screening of CoronA viRus) aimed to develop an algorithm to screen for COVID-19 using a dataset of Portuguese participants with voice recordings and clinical data. Methods: This cross-sectional study aimed to characterise the pattern of sounds produced by the vocal apparatus in patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection documented by a positive RT-PCR test, and to develop and validate a screening algorithm. In Phase II, the algorithm developed in Phase I was tested in a real-world setting. Results: In Phase I, after filtering, the training group consisted of 166 subjects who were effectively available to train the classification model (34.3% SARS-CoV-2 positive/65.7% SARS-CoV-2 negative). Phase II enrolled 58 participants (69.0% SARS-CoV-2 positive/31.0% SARS-CoV-2 negative). The final model achieved a sensitivity of 85%, a specificity of 88.9%, and an F1-score of 84.7%, suggesting voice screening algorithms as an attractive strategy for COVID-19 diagnosis. Conclusions: Our findings highlight the potential of a voice-based detection strategy as an alternative method for respiratory tract screening. Full article

The behavioural, physiological, and energetic repercussions for wildlife that result from changes in their soundscapes are increasingly being realized. To understand the effects of changing acoustic landscapes, we first must establish the importance of the acoustic sense for species to transfer information between the environment, con- and heterospecifics, and a receiver, and the functional role of calling in behaviours such as foraging, navigation, mate attraction, and weaning. This review begins with a discussion of the use of calling and the acquisition of the vocal repertoire, before providing examples from multiple taxa on the functional applications of signals and communication. The acoustic sensory mode adds to, if not being inherent in, many critical life history stages over a range of species. The potential effects on an animal resulting from a change in its perceived soundscape and disturbance on its acoustics use is outlined. This can then be used to consider the implications of an altered acoustic niche or active space in the success and survival of an individual or species. Furthermore, we discuss briefly metrics that could be used to understand the implications of these changes, or could be used to guide mitigation action to lessen the impact. Full article

The present research investigated the role of sex in the effect of vocal attractiveness on fairness judgment in a two-person Ultimatum Game. Each participant in the game decided whether to accept offers from a proposer who was either associated with an attractive or unattractive voice. The results showed that while participants were more likely to accept fair offers, they would also accept some unfair offers that were associated with an attractive voice. This effect of vocal attractiveness was more clearly shown by female participants, although all male and female participants took longer to make a decision when an attractive voice was associated with an offer, regardless of whether the voice was from the same sex or the opposite sex. Overall, the results inform the role of sex in the effect of vocal attractiveness and further confirm the beauty premium effect on economic bargaining, where people with an attractive voice would benefit. Full article

About 5–10% of software engineers suffer from repetitive strain injury, and it would be better to provide an alternative way to write code instead of using a mouse and keyboard and sitting on a chair the whole day. Coding by voice is an attractive approach, and quite a bit of work has been done in that direction. At the same time, dictating plain Java text with low accuracy through the existing voice recognition engines or providing complex panels controlled by the voice makes the coding process even more complex. We argue that current programming languages are suitable for programming by hand, not by mouth. We try to solve this problem by designing a new programming language, VoiceJava, suitable for dictating. A Java program is constructed in a syntax-directed way through a sequence of VoiceJava commands. As a result, users do not need to dictate spaces, parentheses, and commas, reducing the vocal load. Full article

The extraction of a target speaker from mixtures of different speakers has attracted extensive amounts of attention and research. Previous studies have proposed several methods, such as SpeakerBeam, to tackle this speech extraction problem using clean speech from the target speaker to provide information. However, clean speech cannot be obtained immediately in most cases. In this study, we addressed this problem by extracting features from the electroglottographs (EGGs) of target speakers. An EGG is a laryngeal function detection technology that can detect the impedance and condition of vocal cords. Since EGGs have excellent anti-noise performance due to the collection method, they can be obtained in rather noisy environments. In order to obtain clean speech from target speakers out of the mixtures of different speakers, we utilized deep learning methods and used EGG signals as additional information to extract target speaker. In this way, we could extract target speaker from mixtures of different speakers without needing clean speech from the target speakers. According to the characteristics of the EGG signals, we developed an EGG_auxiliary network to train a speaker extraction model under the assumption that EGG signals carry information about speech signals. Additionally, we took the correlations between EGGs and speech signals in silent and unvoiced segments into consideration to develop a new network involving EGG preprocessing. We achieved improvements in the scale invariant signal-to-distortion ratio improvement (SISDRi) of 0.89 dB on the Chinese Dual-Mode Emotional Speech Database (CDESD) and 1.41 dB on the EMO-DB dataset. In addition, our methods solved the problem of poor performance with target speakers of the same gender and the different between the same gender situation and the problem of greatly reduced precision under the low SNR circumstances. Full article

We explored the spatial and temporal characteristics of the urban forest area soundscape by setting up monitoring points (70 × 70 m grid) covering the study area, recorded a total of 52 sound sources, and the results showed that: (1) The soundscape composition of the park is dominated by natural sounds and recreational sounds. (2) The diurnal variation of sound sources is opposite to that of temperature, 6:00–9:00 is the best time for the public to perceive birdsong, and after 18:00, the park is dominated by insect chirps. (3) The PSD (power spectral density) and the SDI (soundscape diversity index) of the park are greatly affected by public recreation behaviors, and some recreation behaviors may affect the vocal behavior of organisms such as birds. (4) Spaces with high canopy density can attract more birdsong and recreational sounds in summer, and the combination of “tree + lake” can attract more birdsong. Vegetation has a significant dampening effect on traffic sound. (5) Landscape spatial elements, such as the proportion of hard ground, sky, trees, and shrubs, have a significant impact on changes in the PSD, the SDI and different kinds of sound sources. The research results provide effective data support for improving the soundscape of urban forests. Full article

The giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) has long attracted the attention of conservationists as a flagship and umbrella species. Collecting attribute information on the age structure and sex ratio of the wild giant panda populations can support our understanding of their status and the design of more effective conservation schemes. In view of the shortcomings of traditional methods, which cannot automatically recognize the age and sex of giant pandas, we designed a SENet (Squeeze-and-Excitation Network)-based model to automatically recognize the attributes of giant pandas from their vocalizations. We focused on the recognition of age groups (juvenile and adult) and sex of giant pandas. The reason for using vocalizations is that among the modes of animal communication, sound has the advantages of long transmission distances, strong penetrating power, and rich information. We collected a dataset of calls from 28 captive giant panda individuals, with a total duration of 1298.02 s of recordings. We used MFCC (Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients), which is an acoustic feature, as inputs for the SENet. Considering that small datasets are not conducive to convergence in the training process, we increased the size of the training data via SpecAugment. In addition, we used focal loss to reduce the impact of data imbalance. Our results showed that the F1 scores of our method for recognizing age group and sex reached 96.46% ± 5.71% and 85.85% ± 7.99%, respectively, demonstrating that the automatic recognition of giant panda attributes based on their vocalizations is feasible and effective. This more convenient, quick, timesaving, and laborsaving attribute recognition method can be used in the investigation of wild giant pandas in the future. Full article

Maned wolves (Chrysocyon brachyurus) are monogamous and display biparental care for their young, although adults rarely spend time in close proximity. To better understand vocal interactions of maned wolves over long-distances, we passively recorded >10 months of audio data in the species’ natural habitat and analyzed manual recordings of captive animals, covering the reproductive and non-reproductive seasons. In the natural habitat recordings, we found that maned wolves engage in vocal exchanges (termed interactive sequences) more often during the mating season, suggesting the existence of a partner attraction/reunion/guarding function, and also during the initial parental care period, suggesting communication among caregivers. We analyzed 21 interactive sequences, which were the only instances in which we could distinguish individuals, and found that the individuals interacting differed significantly in their roar-bark parameters, including duration, which also differed between males and females in captivity (male vocalizations were, on average, 0.124 s longer). We also found that interactive sequences in captive animals, involving two or more participants, almost always involved both sexes. These results suggest that acoustic interacting maned wolves are most likely male–female dyads. Full article