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You talkin' to me? Communicative talker gaze activates left-lateralized superior temporal cortex during perception of degraded speech.

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

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Authors

McGettigan, Carolyn 
Jasmin, Kyle 
Eisner, Frank 
Agnew, Zarinah K 
Josephs, Oliver J 

Abstract

Neuroimaging studies of speech perception have consistently indicated a left-hemisphere dominance in the temporal lobes' responses to intelligible auditory speech signals (McGettigan and Scott, 2012). However, there are important communicative cues that cannot be extracted from auditory signals alone, including the direction of the talker's gaze. Previous work has implicated the superior temporal cortices in processing gaze direction, with evidence for predominantly right-lateralized responses (Carlin & Calder, 2013). The aim of the current study was to investigate whether the lateralization of responses to talker gaze differs in an auditory communicative context. Participants in a functional MRI experiment watched and listened to videos of spoken sentences in which the auditory intelligibility and talker gaze direction were manipulated factorially. We observed a left-dominant temporal lobe sensitivity to the talker's gaze direction, in which the left anterior superior temporal sulcus/gyrus and temporal pole showed an enhanced response to direct gaze - further investigation revealed that this pattern of lateralization was modulated by auditory intelligibility. Our results suggest flexibility in the distribution of neural responses to social cues in the face within the context of a challenging speech perception task.

Description

Keywords

FMRI, Gaze, Laterality, Speech comprehension, Adolescent, Adult, Attention, Brain Mapping, Communication, Female, Fixation, Ocular, Functional Laterality, Humans, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Oxygen, Speech, Speech Perception, Temporal Lobe, Young Adult

Journal Title

Neuropsychologia

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0028-3932
1873-3514

Volume Title

100

Publisher

Elsevier BV