This project is a program of experimental research on the neuropsychology of the perception of facial expressions and emotion-relevant tone of voice (speech prosody).
The aim of the project to determine the extent to which these two skills represent independent psychological facilities that have special properties, that function as partially autonomous perceptual subsystems, and that can be localized to identifiable brain regions, (as opposed to the possibility that emotion judgments from voice and face are carried out by more global faculties, such as a general face processor, a general emotion processor, or a general complex pattern process.) Specific hypotheses related to this issue will be tested by having normal and brain-damaged subjects participate in a series of tasks involving the recognition, discrimination, naming, and judging of similarity among facial expressions, among voices displaying emotional tone, and among a variety of related visual and auditory patterns. These tasks apply experimental paradigms and techniques of data analyses from cognitive and perceptual psychology, designed to tease apart component abilities in perceptual judgments. Comparisons will be made among groups of patients with focal lesions in certain of the right cerebral hemisphere, patients with similar left hemisphere lesions, and matched control patients, with particular attention to the skill components that can be lost or retained independently and those that are lost or retained as a set.
| Viswanathan, Navin; Magnuson, James S; Fowler, Carol A (2014) Information for coarticulation: Static signal properties or formant dynamics? J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 40:1228-36 |
| Viswanathan, Navin; Magnuson, James S; Fowler, Carol A (2013) Similar response patterns do not imply identical origins: an energetic masking account of nonspeech effects in compensation for coarticulation. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 39:1181-92 |
| Viswanathan, Navin; Magnuson, James S; Fowler, Carol A (2010) Compensation for coarticulation: disentangling auditory and gestural theories of perception of coarticulatory effects in speech. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 36:1005-15 |
| Viswanathan, Navin; Fowler, Carol A; Magnuson, James S (2009) A critical examination of the spectral contrast account of compensation for coarticulation. Psychon Bull Rev 16:74-9 |
| Etcoff, N L; Magee, J J (1992) Categorical perception of facial expressions. Cognition 44:227-40 |
