Becker, Katherine M., authorRojas, Donald C., advisorDavalos, Deana B., committee memberGraham, Dan J., committee memberStephens, Jaclyn A., committee member2020-08-312022-08-242020https://hdl.handle.net/10217/211820Vocal emotion, or emotional prosody, is conveyed via suprasegmental changes to the acoustic qualities of a speaker's voice. Prosody is essential to affect perception as it can independently and instantaneously convey emotion. Prosody normally coincides with affective facial expressions and other non-verbal cues to form holistic emotional percepts. Prior research pairing emotional voices with affective faces found that emotion perception may be biased by emotional prosody, as affective faces presented with a happy voice were rated 'happier' than faces presented with an angry or neutral voice. While these findings indicate that emotion perception is biased by voice prosody, the precise mechanism of this bias remains unclear. Since vision predominates perception, much like in the more well-known McGurk effect, it is likely that visual cues in the speaker influence the prosodic bias. Visual modality cues in the face may moderate this bias via increased fixations to the mouth or eyes, potentially changing the influence of prosody as the perceiver is or is not directed to visual cues associated with auditory information. Thus, increased visual attention to moving mouths may increase the perceptual bias created by prosodic voices. Visual attention patterns will be directed to fixate on either the mouth or eyes of speaking faces paired with either emotionally congruent or incongruent voices. The current study will use behavioral measures, electroencephalography, and magnetoencephalography to assess the neural and behavioral correlates underlying the effects of emotional congruency and visual attention on prosodic perceptual biases.born digitaldoctoral dissertationsengCopyright and other restrictions may apply. User is responsible for compliance with all applicable laws. For information about copyright law, please see https://libguides.colostate.edu/copyright.emotionmultimodalpsychophysicsmagnetoencephalographyelectroencephalographyprosodyText