Carola Tuerk (Hyde Lab) will present the article: Abrams, D. A., Chen, T., Odriozola, P., Cheng, K. M., Baker, A. E., Padmanabhan, A., … & Menon, V. (2016). Neural circuits underlying mother’s voice perception predict social communication abilities in children. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(22), 6295-6300.

Significance: “The human voice provides a wealth of social information, including who is speaking. A salient voice in a child’s life is mother’s voice, which guides social function during development. Here we identify brain circuits that are selectively engaged in children by their mother’s voice and show that this brain activity predicts social communication abilities. Nonsense words produced by mother activate multiple brain systems, including reward, emotion, and face-processing centers, reflecting how widely mother’s voice is broadcast throughout a child’s brain. Importantly, this activity provides a neural fingerprint of children’s social communication abilities. This approach provides a template for investigating social function in clinical disorders, e.g., autism, in which perception of biologically salient voices may be impaired.”

Organizers:

Megha Sharda, Postdoctoral Fellow, Auditory Brain and Cognitive Development Laboratory, Dept. of Psychology, University of Montreal, Faculty of Medicine, McGill University

Eva Nadon, Ph.D. Candidate in Neuropsychology – Research and Intervention, University of Montreal