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The link between auditory salience and emotion intensity.
1Division of Cognitive Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden.
Cognition & Emotion
|March 5, 2020
Summary
Emotionally intense vocalizations use a "salience code" to capture attention by maximizing bottom-up auditory processing. This acoustic strategy, not just emotional content, influences memory recall for these sounds.
Area of Science:
- Evolutionary Biology
- Auditory Neuroscience
- Psychology
Background:
- Emotionally intense vocalizations may evolve to exploit auditory processing biases.
- Maximizing bottom-up salience is a proposed mechanism to ensure listener attention and prevent habituation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To test the
- salience code
- hypothesis in human nonverbal vocalizations.
- To investigate the relationship between vocalization salience, perceived emotion intensity, and memory recall.
Main Methods:
- 128 human nonverbal vocalizations across eight emotions were analyzed.
- Pairwise comparisons were used to derive salience ratings.
- A short-term memory task assessed recall errors for high- vs. low-salience sounds.
Main Results:
- Salience ratings strongly correlated with perceived emotion intensity within each emotion category.
- High-salience sounds led to 25% more recall errors, independent of emotion intensity.
- Acoustic features of salient vocalizations align with those of non-emotional attention-grabbing sounds.
Conclusions:
- The
- salience code
- hypothesis is supported, demonstrating that vocalization salience, driven by acoustic properties, influences auditory processing and memory.
- Human and animal high-arousal vocalizations may share non-arbitrary acoustic properties due to alignment with sensory biases.
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