Emotional salience enhances intelligibility in adverse acoustic conditions

OLANO, MARÍA A.; ACUÑA, ANDRÉS; ALBA-FERRARA, LUCÍA; CHAMBEAUD, NAHUEL; KOCHEN, SILVIA; CHAMBEAUD, NAHUEL; KOCHEN, SILVIA; ELIZALDE ACEVEDO, BAUTISTA; MARCÓ, MARIANO; ELIZALDE ACEVEDO, BAUTISTA; MARCÓ, MARIANO; OLANO, MARÍA A.; ACUÑA, ANDRÉS; ALBA-FERRARA, LUCÍA

NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

Año: 2020 vol. 147

0028-3932

Introduction: Emotion facilitates word recognition under adverse acoustic conditions. We use an auditory emotional paradigm to evaluate the ability to distinguish words from irrelevant random stimuli, elucidating its neural correlates. Secondarily, we evaluate the impact of schizotypy traits on this capacity. Methods: 25 participants, undertook an fMRI task, indicating whether they recognized words, through a response box. 20 audio files of emotionally negative words and 20 neutral words were presented. Word intelligibility was manipulated merging the audio files with white noise at varying signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), resulting in 3 levels (high, medium, and low). We measured schizotypy with the O-LIFE scale. Results: A 2x3 factorial ANOVA was performed with emotion (neutral or negative) and intelligibility (high, medium, and low) as factors. There was an interaction between emotion and intelligibility [F(2,44) = 23.89,p