Stefan R. Schweinberger

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by a range of symptoms, including restrictive behaviors and deficient social skills. We investigated EEG correlates of social attention, face, and non-face perception by applying a continuous performance test (CPT) with two different sets of stimuli (letters and faces). The CPT required participants t...

We investigated the perception of Big Five personality traits from trait-average voices when traits were based either on speakers’ self-ratings (Exp. 1, E1) or on other perceivers’ ratings of perceived personality of the original voice samples (E2). Trait-average voices were created from a voice database of 93 speakers (40 male, 53 female) using TA...

Musicians have an advantage in recognizing vocal emotions compared to non-musicians, a performance advantage often attributed to enhanced early auditory sensitivity to pitch. Yet a previous ERP study only detected group differences from 500 ms onward, suggesting that conventional ERP analyses might not be sensitive enough to detect early neural eff...

Misinformation disrupts our information ecosystem, adversely affecting individuals and straining social cohesion and democracy. Understanding what causes online (mis)information to (re)appear is crucial for fortifying our information ecosystem. We analyzed a large-scale Twitter (now “X”) dataset of about 2 million tweets across 123 fact-checked sto...

Individuals can strongly vary in their ability to process face identity. Understanding the mechanisms driving these differences is important for theoretical development, and in clinical and applied contexts. Here we investigate the role of face-space properties in relation to individual face identity processing skills. We consider two fundamental p...

Existing literature has documented diminished norm‐based adaptation (aftereffects) across several perceptual domains in autism. However, the exact underlying mechanisms, such as sensory dominance possibly caused by imprecise priors and/or increased sensory precision, remain elusive. The “Bayesian brain” framework offers refined methods to investiga...

Introduction Research has shown that women’s vocal characteristics change during the menstrual cycle. Further, evidence suggests that individuals alter their voices depending on the context, such as when speaking to a highly attractive person, or a person with a different social status. The present study aimed at investigating the degree to which w...

Humans are highly social, typically without this ability requiring noticeable efforts. Yet, such social fluency poses challenges both for the human brain to compute and for scientists to study. Over the last few decades, neuroscientific research in human sociality has witnessed a shift in focus from single-brain analysis to complex dynamics occurri...

Cracking the non‐verbal “code” of human emotions has been a chief interest of generations of scientists. Yet, despite much effort, a dictionary that clearly maps non‐verbal behaviours onto meaning remains elusive. We suggest this is due to an over‐reliance on language‐related concepts and an under‐appreciation of the evolutionary context in which a...

Humans are highly social, typically without this ability requiring noticeable efforts. Yet, such social fluency poses challenges both for the human brain to compute and for scientists to study. Over the last few decades, neuroscientific research in human sociality has witnessed a shift in focus from single-brain analysis to complex dynamics occurri...

The brain calibrates itself based on the past stimulus diet, which makes frequently observed stimuli appear as typical (as opposed to uncommon stimuli, which appear as distinctive). Based on predictive processing theory, the brain should be more “prepared” for typical exemplars, because these contain information that has been encountered frequently...

Neurofeedback training (NFT) is a promising adjuvant intervention method. The desynchronization of mu rhythm (8–13 Hz) in the electroencephalogram (EEG) over centro-parietal areas is known as a valid indicator of mirror neuron system (MNS) activation, which has been associated with social skills. Still, the effect of neurofeedback training on the M...

We investigated the perception of Big Five personality traits from trait-average voices when traits were based either on speakers´ self-ratings (Exp. 1, E1) or on other perceivers’ ratings of perceived personality of the original voice samples (E2). Trait-average voices were created from a voice database of 93 speakers (40 male, 53 female) using TA...

Social media can be a major accelerator of the spread of misinformation, thereby potentially compromising both individual well-being and social cohesion. Despite significant recent advances, the study of online misinformation is a relatively young field facing several (methodological) challenges. In this regard, the detection of online misinformati...

Individuals can strongly vary in their ability to process face identity. Understanding the mechanisms driving these differences is important for theoretical development, and in clinical and applied contexts. Here we investigate the role of face-space properties in relation to individual face identity processing skills. We consider two fundamental p...

In the rapidly evolving landscape of multimodal communication research, this follow-up to Gregori et al. (2023) explores the transformative role of machine learning (ML), particularly using multi-modal large language models, in tracking, augmenting, annotating, and analyzing multimodal data. Building upon the foundations laid in our previous work,...

Empirical investigations into eyewitness identification accuracy typically necessitate the creation of novel stimulus materials, which can be a challenging and time-consuming task. To facilitate this process and promote further research in this domain, we introduce the new Jena Eyewitness Research Stimuli (JERS). They comprise six video sequences d...

Musicians outperform non-musicians in vocal emotion recognition, but the underlying mechanisms are still debated. Behavioral measures highlight the importance of auditory sensitivity towards emotional voice cues. However, it remains unclear whether and how this group difference is reflected at the brain level. Here, we compared event-related potent...

The brain calibrates itself based on the past stimulus diet, which makes frequently observed stimuli appear as typical (as opposed to uncommon stimuli, which appear as distinctive). Based on predictive processing theory, the brain should be more prepared for typical exemplars, because these contain information that has been encountered frequently,...

Neurofeedback training (NFT) is a promising adjuvant intervention method. The desynchronization of mu rhythm (8–13 Hz) in the electroencephalogram (EEG) over centro-parietal areas is known as a valid indicator of mirror neuron system (MNS) activation, which has been associated with social skills. Still, the effect of neurofeedback training on the M...

Musicians outperform non‐musicians in vocal emotion perception, likely because of increased sensitivity to acoustic cues, such as fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre. Yet, how musicians make use of these acoustic cues to perceive emotions, and how they might differ from non‐musicians, is unclear. To address these points, we created vocal stimuli...

We describe JAVMEPS, an audiovisual (AV) database for emotional voice and dynamic face stimuli, with voices varying in emotional intensity. JAVMEPS includes 2256 stimulus files comprising (A) recordings of 12 speakers, speaking four bisyllabic pseudowords with six naturalistic induced basic emotions plus neutral, in auditory-only, visual-only, and...

Social media can be a major accelerator of the spread of misinformation, thereby potentially compromising both individual well-being and social cohesion. Despite significant recent advances, the study of online misinformation is a relatively young field facing several (methodological) challenges. In this regard, the detection of online misinformati...

Simple Summary Guide dogs can help visually impaired persons to feel more confident and independent. Twenty-one guide dog owners reported the following factors to be important for a good match between a dog and an owner: sharing hobbies, similar activity levels or higher activeness in dogs, similar expressions of calmness; happiness; greediness; an...

Valentine's influential norm-based multidimensional face-space model (nMDFS) predicts that perceived distinctiveness increases with distance to the norm. Occipito-temporal event-related potentials (ERPs) have been recently shown to respond selectively to variations in distance-to-norm (P200) or familiarity (N250, late negativity), respectively (Wut...

Multimodal communication research focuses on how different means of signalling coordinate to communicate effectively. This line of research is traditionally influenced by fields such as cognitive and neuroscience, human-computer interaction, and linguistics. With new technologies becoming available in fields such as natural language processing and...

Valentine’s influential norm-based multidimensional face-space model (nMDFS) predicts that perceived distinctiveness increases with distance to the norm. Occipito-temporal event-related potentials (ERPs) have been recently shown to respond selectively to variations in distance-to-norm (P200) or familiarity (N250, late negativity), respectively (Wut...

Research into voice perception benefits from manipulation software to gain experimental control over acoustic expression of social signals such as vocal emotions. Today, parameter-specific voice morphing allows a precise control of the emotional quality expressed by single vocal parameters, such as fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre. However, po...

Recognizing people from their voices may be facilitated by a voice’s distinctiveness, in a manner similar to that which has been reported for faces. However, little is known about the neural time-course of voice learning and the role of facial information in voice learning. Based on evidence for audiovisual integration in the recognition of familia...

Although different human races do not exist from the perspective of biology and genetics, ascribed ‘race’ influences psychological processing, such as memory and perception of faces. Research from this Special Issue, as well as a wealth of previous research, shows that other‐‘race’ faces are more difficult to recognize compared to own‐‘race’ faces,...

Speech comprehension counts as benchmark outcome of cochlear implants (CIs) – disregarding the communicative importance of efficient integration of audiovisual (AV) socio-emotional information. We investigated effects of time-synchronized facial information on vocal emotion recognition (VER). In Exp1, 26 CI users and normal-hearing (NH) individuals...

Most findings on prosopagnosia to date suggest preserved voice recognition in prosopagnosia (except in cases with bilateral lesions). Here we report a follow-up examination on M.T., suffering from acquired prosopagnosia following a large unilateral right-hemispheric lesion in frontal, parietal, and anterior temporal areas excluding core ventral occ...

Vocal emotion recognition (VER) in natural speech, often referred to as speech emotion recognition (SER), remains challenging for both humans and computers. Applied fields including clinical diagnosis and intervention, social interaction research or Human Computer Interaction (HCI) increasingly benefit from efficient VER algorithms. Several feature...

Two competing theories explain the other-‘race’ effect (ORE) either by greater perceptual expertise to same-‘race’ (SR) faces or by social categorization of other-‘race’ (OR) faces at the expense of individuation. To assess expertise and categorization contributions to the ORE, a promising—yet overlooked—approach is comparing activations for differ...

The use of digitally modified stimuli with enhanced diagnostic information to improve verbal communication in children with sensory or central handicaps was pioneered by Tallal and colleagues in 1996, who targeted speech comprehension in language-learning impaired children. Today, researchers are aware that successful communication cannot be reduce...

Objectives: Research on cochlear implants (CIs) has focused on speech comprehension, with little research on perception of vocal emotions. We compared emotion perception in CI users and normal-hearing (NH) individuals, using parameter-specific voice morphing. Design: Twenty-five CI users and 25 NH individuals (matched for age and gender) perform...

The ability to recognize someone’s voice spans a broad spectrum with phonagnosia on the low end and super-recognition at the high end. Yet there is no standardized test to measure an individual’s ability of learning and recognizing newly learned voices with samples of speech-like phonetic variability. We have developed the Jena Voice Learning and M...

Our ability to infer a speaker’s emotional state depends on the processing of acoustic parameters such as fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre. Yet, how these parameters are processed and integrated to inform emotion perception remains largely unknown. Here we pursued this issue using a novel parameter-specific voice morphing technique to create s...

Since COVID-19 has become a pandemic, everyday life has seen dramatic changes affecting individuals, families, and children with and without autism. Among other things, these changes entail more time at home, digital forms of communication, school closures, and reduced support and intervention. Here, we assess the effects of the pandemic on quality...

Traditionally, nonverbal behaviors have been understood as coded messages one person sends to another. Following this tradition, social touch has been pursued by asking what it communicates. We argue this question is misleading and ask instead how touch impacts on those giving and receiving it. Indeed, a growing literature investigating gentle phys...

While the human perceptual system constantly adapts to the environment, some of the underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood. For instance, although previous research demonstrated perceptual aftereffects in emotional voice adaptation, the contribution of different vocal cues to these effects is unclear. In two experiments, we used paramete...

»Verschwörungstheorien« haben Konjunktur – doch was liegt ihnen zugrunde? Verschwörungsdenken verweist auf eine ausgeprägte Bereitschaft, hinter verschiedensten Ereignissen verborgenes Wirken einer im Geheimen operierenden und übermächtigen Gruppe von Personen anzunehmen. Zugleich ist damit eine Wahrnehmungs- und Deutungskultur bezeichnet, in der s...

Recent research suggested disproportional usage of shape information by people with poor face recognition, although texture information appears to be more important for familiar face recognition. Here, we tested a training program with faces that were selectively caricatured in either shape or texture parameters. Forty-eight young adults with poor...

Modifying established motor skills is a challenging endeavor due to proactive interference from undesired old to desired new actions, calling for high levels of cognitive control. Motor restrictions may facilitate the modification of motor skills by rendering undesired responses physically impossible, thus reducing demands to response inhibition. H...

Conspiracy theories in social networks are considered to have adverse effects on individuals’ compliance with public health measures in the context of a pandemic situation. A deeper understanding of how conspiracy theories propagate through social networks is critical for the development of countermeasures. The present work focuses on a novel appro...

Links between musicality and vocal emotion perception skills have only recently emerged as a focus of study. Here we review current evidence for or against such links. Based on a systematic literature search, we identified 33 studies that addressed either (a) vocal emotion perception in musicians and nonmusicians, (b) vocal emotion perception in in...

Although the other-race effect (ORE; superior recognition of own- relative to other-race faces) is well established, the mechanisms underlying it are not well understood. We examined whether the ORE is attributable to differential use of shape and texture cues for own- vs. other-race faces. Shape cues are particularly important for detecting that a...

Changing pre-existing, automatized motor skills often requires interference control. Prepotent response inhibition – one subdimension of inhibition – has been theorized to be particularly associated with successful interference control in motor skills. Recent evidence suggests that different inhibition subdimensions elicit distinct ERP patterns (wi...

The ability to recognize someone’s voice exists on a broad spectrum with phonagnosia on the low end and super recognition at the high end. Yet there is no standardized test to measure an individual’s ability of learning and recognizing newly-learnt voices with samples of speech-like phonetic variability. We have developed the Jena Voice Learning an...

Conspiracy theories in social networks are considered to have adverse effects on individuals' compliance with public health measures in the context of a pandemic situation. A deeper understanding of how conspiracy theories propagate through social networks is critical for the development of countermeasures. The present work focuses on a novel appro...

Background: Since COVID-19 has become pandemic, everyday life has seen dramatic changes affecting individuals, families, and children with and without autism. These entail, among other things, more time at home, digital forms of communication, school closures, and reduced support and intervention. Aim: Here we aim to systematically assess the effec...

Although previous research demonstrated perceptual aftereffects in emotional voice adaptation, the contribution of different vocal cues to these effects is unclear. In two experiments, we used parameter-specific morphing of adaptor voices to investigate the relative roles of fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre in vocal emotion adaptation, using a...

An increasing body of scientific research on the nature, correlates, and effects of compassion has accrued over recent years. Expert agreement has not yet been reached on the conceptualisation of compassion for others, and existing self-report measures of compassion for others have often lacked psychometric quality and content validity. Recent publ...

While tinnitus is known to compromise the perception of speech, it is unclear if the same holds for extralinguistic speaker information. Furthermore, research with simple tone stimuli showed that unilateral tinnitus binds spatial attention, thereby impeding the detection of auditory changes in the non-affected ear. Using dichotic listening tasks, w...

Links between musicality and vocal emotion perception skills have only recently emerged as a focus of study. Here we review current evidence for or against such links. Based on a systematic literature search, we identified 33 studies that addressed either (1) vocal emotion perception in musicians and non-musicians, (2) effects of musical training i...

We used computer-based automatic expression analysis to investigate the impact of imitation on facial emotion recognition with a baseline-intervention-retest design. The participants: 55 young adults with varying degrees of autistic traits, completed an emotion recognition task with images of faces displaying one of six basic emotional expressions....

Facial attractiveness has been linked to the averageness (or typicality) of a face and, more tentatively, to a speaker's vocal attractiveness, via the ‘honest signal’ hypothesis, holding that attractiveness signals good genes. In four experiments, we assessed ratings for attractiveness and two common measures of distinctiveness (‘distinctiveness-in...

Purpose In their letter, Meister et al. (2020) appropriately point to a potential influence of stimulus type, arguing cochlear implant (CI) users may have the ability to use timbre cues only for complex stimuli such as sentences but not for brief stimuli such as vowel–consonant–vowel or single words. While we cannot exclude this possibility on the...

While humans have developed a sophisticated and unique system of verbal auditory communication, they also share a more common and evolutionarily important nonverbal channel of voice signaling with many other mammalian and vertebrate species. This nonverbal communication is mediated and modulated by the acoustic properties of a voice signal, and is...

Background Abnormalities in fronto-striatal-thalamic (FST) sub-circuits are present in schizophrenia and are associated with cognitive impairments. However, it remains unknown whether abnormalities in FST sub-circuits are present before psychosis onset. This may be elucidated by investigating 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11DS), a genetic syndrome...

Purpose Using naturalistic synthesized speech, we determined the relative importance of acoustic cues in voice gender and age perception in cochlear implant (CI) users. Method We investigated 28 CI users' abilities to utilize fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre in perceiving voice gender (Experiment 1) and vocal age (Experiment 2). Parameter-spe...

The use of signs as a major means for communication affects other functions such as spatial processing. Intriguingly, this is true even for functions which are less obviously linked to language processing. Speakers using signs outperform non-signers in face recognition tasks, potentially as a result of a lifelong focus on the mouth region for speec...

Background Cognitive decline is considered a fundamental component in schizophrenia. Abnormalities in fronto-striatal-thalamic (FST) sub-circuits are present in schizophrenia and are associated with cognitive impairments. However, it remains unknown whether abnormalities in FST sub-circuits are present before psychosis onset. This may be elucidated...

While research with individuals on the autistic spectrum has increased strongly, there is still a lack of research on autism/autistic traits in older adults. Children with autism have been proposed to benefit from interactions with social robots; for older adults, the potential role of robotics is currently being discussed. We combined these topics...

Background Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is characterized by an excessive preoccupation with one or more perceived flaws in one’s own appearance. Previous studies provided evidence for deficits in configural and holistic processing in BDD. Preliminary evidence suggests abnormalities at an early stage of visual processing. The present study is the...

Faces and voices are of high importance in interpersonal communication, and there are notable parallels between face and voice perception. However, these parallels do not sit entirely comfortably with the full range of available evidence. In this review, we evaluate parallels between the functional and neural organisation of face and voice percepti...

Purpose: Using naturalistic synthesized speech, we determined the relative importance of acoustic cues in voice gender and, for the first time, vocal age perception in Cochlear Implant (CI) users. Method: We investigated 28 CI users’ abilities to utilize fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre in perceiving voice gender (Experiment 1) and additiona...

The prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has increased strongly over the past decades, and so has the demand for adequate behavioral assessment and support for persons affected by ASD. Here we provide a review on original research that used sensor technology for an objective assessment of social behavior, either with the aim to assist the...

Here we describe the Jena Speaker Set (JESS), a free database for unfamiliar adult voice stimuli, comprising voices from 61 young (18–25 years) and 59 old (60–81 years) female and male speakers uttering various sentences, syllables, read text, semi-spontaneous speech, and vowels. Listeners rated two voice samples (short sentences) per speaker for a...

Autistic traits vary across the general population, and are linked with face recognition ability. Here we investigated potential links between autistic traits and voice recognition ability for personally familiar voices in a group of 30 listeners (15 female, 16-19 years) from the same local school. Autistic traits (particularly those related to com...

The continuous flash suppression (CFS) task can be used to investigate what limits our capacity to become aware of visual stimuli. In this task, a stream of rapidly changing mask images to one eye initially suppresses awareness for a static target image presented to the other eye. Several factors may determine the breakthrough time from mask suppre...

Recent electrophysiological evidence suggests a rapid acquisition of novel speaker representations during intentional voice learning. We investigated effects of learning intention on voice recognition, using a variant of the directed forgetting paradigm. In an old/new recognition task following voice learning, we compared performance and event-rela...

The norm-based face space model (nMDFS) predicts that perceived typicality decreases with distance to the norm. Accordingly, an original face and its corresponding anti-face (deviating in exactly opposite direction from the norm) should inherit equivalent levels of typicality. Similarly, varying distance-to-norm (DTN, in absolute values) should hav...

A common cognitive problem reported by older people is compromised face recognition, which is often paralleled by age-related changes in face-sensitive and memory-related components in event-related brain potentials (ERPs). We developed a new training using photorealistic caricatures based on evidence that caricatures are beneficial for people with...

Posed facial expressions of actors have often been used as stimuli to induce mental state inferences, in order to investigate “Theory of Mind” processes. However, such stimuli make it difficult to determine whether perceivers are using a basic or more elaborated mentalizing strategy. The current study used as stimuli covert recordings of target ind...

Our capacity to become aware of visual stimuli is limited. Investigating these limits, Cohen et al. (2015, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience) found that certain object categories (e.g., faces) were more effective in blocking awareness of other categories (e.g., buildings) than other combinations (e.g., cars/chairs) in the continuous flash suppressi...

Facial attractiveness has been linked to the averageness (or typicality) of a face. More tentatively, it has also been linked to a speaker’s vocal attractiveness, via the “honest signal” hypothesis, holding that attractiveness signals good genes. In four experiments, we assessed ratings for attractiveness and two common measures of distinctiveness...

It has been hypothesized that visual perspective-taking, a basic Theory of Mind mechanism, might operate quite automatically particularly in terms of ´what´ someone else sees. As such we were interested in whether different social categories of an agent (e.g., gender, race, nationality) influence this mental state ascription mechanism. We tested th...

The idea of a “predictive brain”—that is, the interpretation of internal and external information based on prior expectations—has been elaborated intensely over the past decade. Several domains in cognitive neuroscience have embraced this idea, including studies in perception, motor control, language, and affective, social, and clinical neuroscienc...

Humans are more accurate at remembering faces from their own relative to a different ethnic group (own-race bias). Moreover, better memory for faces from an observer's own relative to the other-gender (own-gender bias) has also been reported, particularly for female participants. Theoretical explanations for these effects either emphasize different...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and neuroimaging studies suggest a role of the right occipital face area (rOFA) in early facial feature processing. However, the degree to which rOFA is necessary for the encoding of facial identity has been less clear. Here we used a state-dependent TMS paradigm, where stimulation preferentially facilitates...

The role of second-order configuration-that is, metric distances between individual features-for familiar face recognition has been the subject of debate. Recent reports suggest that better face recognition abilities coincide with a weaker reliance on shape information for face recognition. We examined contributions of second-order configuration to...

Commentary on Kujala on Canine Emotions

Natural variability between instances of unfamiliar faces can make it difficult to reconcile two images as the same person. Yet for familiar faces, effortless recognition occurs even with considerable variability between images. To explore how stable face representations develop, we employed incidental learning in the form of a face sorting task. I...