Academic Event

Tong Sheng

Doctoral Candidate, Brain and Creativity Institute, Neuroscience Graduate Program, University of Southern California

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Biographical& ;n bsp; note:
Tong is currently a do ct oral candidate in the Neuroscience Graduate Program and Brain and Crea ti vity Institute at the University of Southern California, working und er the mentorship of Dr. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh. He is interested in social cogn i tive neuroscience and has previously used functional neuroimagi n g to investigate the neural networks involved during action observatio n and prosody processing. More recently, Tong has taken network-level approa ches to investigate auditory emotion processing and individual difference s in social cognition. 

Abstract:

The hu man voice is a rich medium for communicating intentions and emo tional state s. Human vocal emotions processing has been shown to invol ve a number of f undamental brain regions such as those associated with spee ch and emot ion processing, but an understanding of the effects of task differences on n etwork-level representation of human vocal emotions is l acking. In two separate fMRI experiments, we investigated 1) sensory and mo tor aspects of non-semantic prosody processing using multivariate pattern a nalysis and 2) task-dependent engagement of an orbitofrontal-amygdala network during per ception of emotional human vocalizations. Together, the results of thes e studies illustrate the effects of subtle and not-so-subtle difference s in task demands on neural network level repr esentations of huma n vocal emotions.</s