SEPIA
The SEPIA project combines the expertise of the Sound Perception and Design team in innovative techniques in psychoacoustics with that of the Imaging and Brain Unit at Inserm/universit. de Tours (Dr. Marie Gomot) in the neuroscientific study of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The diagnosis of autism requires the combined presence of social communication disorders and repetitive and limited behaviors. Yet few studies of ASDs include the socio-emotional and perceptual domains.
Therefore, it remains to be established whether the difficulties of ASDs are related to specific emotional deficits, sensory peculiarities that would be even more pronounced for social stimuli, or both.
Using the vocal smile as a model, each major step of the Perception-Representation-Action loop will be explored in the same patients: children and adults. At the perceptual level, the neural correlates of encoding auditory regularity to emotional stimuli will be studied using electrophysiology (EEG), while series of smiling or neutral repeated voices will be presented to participants. Mental representations of the prototypical auditory smile and motor and autonomic mimicry will be studied through the collection of behavioral (reverse correlations) and physiological (facial electromyography, pupilometry) data respectively, as participants listen to and judge smiling and non-smiling vocal expressions.
This project will make it possible to dissociate perceptual and emotional processes, and to determine at what level physiopathological processes can intervene, thus offering a new mechanistic insight into the socioemotional difficulties of ASDs.
IRCAM's Team : Sound Perception and Design
