Voice selectivity in the temporal voice area despite matched low-level acoustic cues
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In human listeners, the temporal voice areas (TVAs) are regions of the superior temporal gyrus and sulcus that respond more to vocal sounds than a range of nonvocal control sounds, including scrambled voices, environmental noises, and animal cries. One interpretation of the TVA's selectivity is based on low-level acoustic cues: compared to control sounds, vocal sounds may have stronger harmonic content or greater spectrotemporal complexity. Here, we show that the right TVA remains selective to the human voice even when accounting for a variety of acoustical cues. Using fMRI, single vowel stimuli were contrasted with single notes of musical instruments with balanced harmonic-to-noise ratios and pitches. We also used "auditory chimeras", which preserved subsets of acoustical features of the vocal sounds. The right TVA was preferentially activated only for the natural human voice. In particular, the TVA did not respond more to artificial chimeras preserving the exact spectral profile of voices. Additional acoustic measures, including temporal modulations and spectral complexity, could not account for the increased activation. These observations rule out simple acoustical cues as a basis for voice selectivity in the TVAs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".