Gender differences in the temporal voice areas

Abstract

There is not only evidence for behavioral differences in voice perception between female and male listeners, but also recent suggestions for differences in neural correlates between genders. The fMRI functional voice localizer (comprising a univariate analysis contrasting stimulation with vocal vs. non-vocal sounds) is known to give robust estimates of the temporal voice areas (TVAs). However, there is growing interest in employing multivariate analysis approaches to fMRI data (e.g., multivariate pattern analysis; MVPA). The aim of the current study was to localize voice-related areas in both female and male listeners and to investigate whether brain maps may differ depending on the gender of the listener. After a univariate analysis, a random effects analysis was performed on female (n = 149) and male (n = 123) listeners and contrasts between them were computed. In addition, MVPA with a whole-brain searchlight approach was implemented and classification maps were entered into a second-level permutation based random effects models using statistical non-parametric mapping (SnPM; Nichols and Holmes, 2002). Gender differences were found only in the MVPA. Identified regions were located in the middle part of the middle temporal gyrus (bilateral) and the middle superior temporal gyrus (right hemisphere). Our results suggest differences in classifier performance between genders in response to the voice localizer with higher classification accuracy from local BOLD signal patterns in several temporal-lobe regions in female listeners.

A touching Sight: EEG/ERP correlates for the vicarious processing of affectionate touch

“…Nevertheless, the current results corroborate and extend sex differences reported in the literature. As was shown for other nonverbal signals (Ahrens, Awwad Shiekh Hasan, Giordano, & Belin, 2014;Alice M Proverbio & Galli, 2016;Alice M Proverbio et al, 2008;Schirmer & Gunter, 2017a), women were more sensitive than men to displays of interpersonal touch. Specifically, they seemed to activate associated sensorimotor representations more readily both when touch was taskrelevant and when it was task-irrelevant.…”

The Glasgow Voice Memory Test: Assessing the ability to memorize and recognize unfamiliar voices

“…Our finding of better recognition of female voices by female listeners parallels instead the finding of women being more accurate in recognizing the emotional inclination of voices of the same sex, while males are worse at judging affective bursts of male voices (Belin, Fillion-Bilodeau, & Gosselin, 2008). We did not find an effect of gender of the listener on recognition rates, meaning that men and women equally recognized voices, despite their possible differences in voice-related activation of TVAs (Ahrens, Awwad Shiekh Hasan, Giordano, & Belin, 2014).…”

Multivariate sensitivity to voice during auditory categorization

“…We note, however, that the novel aspect of the present finding does not lie in the anatomical localization of the results all non-human categories but rather, in the use of a more specific measure of voice sensitivity, indicating the distinct neural characteristics most associated with response to the human voice, as indicated by discrimination from nonhuman categories in performance across all classification tests. To our knowledge, the present study was the first to measure the voice sensitivity using multivariate and signal detection theory, although MVPA was applied to studying other aspects of voice processing, such as emotional (Ethofer et al 2009) or speaker's gender representation (Ahrens et al 2014). Among the bilateral temporal foci of voice sensitivity, the more stringent eight-way PPV classification yielded three clusters exclusively within the right middle temporal cortex.…”