Shielding voices: The modulation of binding processes between voice features and response features by task representations

ABSTRACT

Vocal events offer not only semantic-linguistic content but also information about the identity and the emotional-motivational state of the speaker. Furthermore, most vocal events have implications for our actions and therefore include action-related features. But the relevance and irrelevance of vocal features varies from task to task. The present study investigates binding processes for perceptual and action-related features of spoken words and their modulation by the task representation of the listener. Participants reacted with two response keys to eight different words spoken by a male or a female voice (Experiment 1) or spoken by an angry or neutral male voice (Experiment 2). There were two instruction conditions: half of participants learned eight stimulus-response mappings by rote (SR), and half of participants applied a binary task rule (TR). In both experiments, SR instructed participants showed clear evidence for binding processes between voice and response features indicated by an interaction between the irrelevant voice feature and the response. By contrast, as indicated by a three-way interaction with instruction, no such binding was found in the TR instructed group. These results are suggestive of binding and shielding as two adaptive mechanisms that ensure successful communication and action in a dynamic social environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Feature binding
• Partial repetition costs
• Social-affective features
• Task shielding
• Voice perception

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Lisa Raith, Katharina Kellner, Katharina Konopka, and Johanna Ganslmeier for data collection and the speakers for recording the stimuli.

Compliance with ethical standards

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Johanna Bogon http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7743-6529

Steffen Landgraf http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3423-8880

Notes

1. In a previous study (Dreisbach & Haider, 2009) we could show that participants who receive SR instructions but create their own task rule actually behave like participants in the TR condition. Since here we do not know at what point in time during the experiment the participant created and used his/her own task rule, we decided to exclude these data entirely and replace them with data of an additional participant.

2. In order to test how reliable the effect is, we replicated the findings of Experiment 1 in an additional experiment with stimuli recorded by a pre-pubertal female and a pre-pubertal male child. We tested 40 participants (20 in the SR group, 20 in the TR group). The procedure was exactly the same as that in Experiment 1, with the exception that the stimuli were recorded by a pre-pubertal female and a pre-pubertal male child. As in Experiment 1, RT analyses revealed a significant triple interaction Instruction × Voice_identity × Response, F(1, 38) = 5.42, p = .025,  = .13. Separate 2 × 2 ANOVAs for each instruction group revealed a significant Voice_identity × Response interaction in the SR group, F(1, 19) = 9.96, p = .005,  = .34, and a non-significant interaction in the TR group F(1, 19) = 0.56, p = .463,  = .03. In the error data, the triple interaction Instruction × Voice_identity × Response was not significant, F(1, 38) = 0.19, p = .669,  = .01. Overall error rates were generally very low (<3%) and should be interpreted with caution.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a grant to Gesine Dreisbach from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) [grant number DR 392/5-3].