Research Line 1: VAS and hallucinations

 

There is a substantial body of evidence showing that a failure to distinguish between internally and externally generated sensory signals (e.g., my voice vs. somebody else’s voice) underlies the experience of auditory hallucinations. This failure seems to result from an inability to predict the sensory consequences of self-generated signals as a consequence of impaired internal forward modeling. Combining the expert knowledge of the research team regarding electrophysiology, experimental and clinical research and translational neuroscience, we use brain imaging techniques (ERP, EEG oscillations, fMRI) to investigate the impact of salience on auditory sensory prediction and its relationship with hallucination predisposition.

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Research Line 2: The effects of musical training on VAS perception

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The musician’s brain is considered a model of experience-driven neuroplasticity. The advantages of musical training and expertise on different cognitive domains have been consistently demonstrated. Some studies indicate that this expertise might translate into enhanced language and speech perception abilities, such as vocal emotional perception.

Previously, we showed that the auditory expertise underlying long-term musical training may impact both early and late stages of vocal emotional processing (Pinheiro et al., 2015, Brain and Language). These results provided partial support for the hypothesis that music and language share neural resources. In our current projects, our goal is to clarify whether musical training enhances the extraction of regularities from synthesized emotional speech and musical samples, using EEG and fMRI.

 

 

Research Line 3: VAS across the development

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The goal of this project is to examine changes in vocal emotional perception and recognition from childhood to old adulthood. Our main interest is to understand how the detection of salience from voice cues relates to brain changes during development.

 

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