Vocal emotion recognition (VER) in natural speech, often referred to as speech emotion recognitio... more 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 sets were used with machine-learning (ML) algorithms for discrete emotion classification. However, there is no consensus for which low-level-descriptors and classifiers are optimal. Therefore, we aimed to compare the performance of machine-learning algorithms with several different feature sets. Concretely, seven ML algorithms were compared on the Berlin Database of Emotional Speech: Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network (MLP), J48 Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machine with Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO), Random Forest (RF), k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Simple Logistic Regression (LOG) and Multinomial Logistic Regression (MLR) wit...
Since COVID-19 has become a pandemic, everyday life has seen dramatic changes affecting individua... more 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 of life for school-age autistic and neurotypical children and adolescents. First, we provide a comprehensive review of the current relevant literature. Next, we report original data from a survey conducted in several countries, assessing activities, well-being, and social life in families with autism, and their changes over time. We focus on differences between children with and without autism from within the same families, and on different outcomes for children with high- or low-functioning autism. While individuals with autism scored lower in emotional and social functioning than their neurotypical siblings, both groups of children show...
Background: Since COVID-19 has become pandemic, everyday life has seen dramatic changes affecting... more 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 effects of the pandemic on autistic and neurotypical (NT) children, and pursue a pre-registered hypothesis suggested by initial observations that some children with autism might respond comparatively well to a situation of constrained, predictable, and digital social communication during the pandemic. Methods: We provide a systematic review of current relevant work, including 76 papers selected from a database search until February 1, 2021. We then report survey data from several countries assessing activities, well-being (PedsQLTM), and social life in families with autism, and their respective change at various stages of the pandemic. We focus...
The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, ... more The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full DRO policy for further details.
Modifying established motor skills is a challenging endeavor due to proactive interference from u... more 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. Here we studied behavioral and EEG effects of rule changes to typing in skilled touch-typists. The respective rule change—typing without using the left index finger—was either implemented per instruction only or with an additional motor restriction. In both groups, the rule change elicited delays and more errors in typing, indicating the occurrence of proactive interference. While stimulus-locked ERPs did not exhibit prominent effects of rule change or group, response-locked ERPs revealed that the time courses of preparatory brain activity preceding typing responses depended on the presence of motor restriction. Although further research is...
The prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has increased strongly over the past decades, a... more 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 assessment of autism or with the aim to use this technology for intervention and support of people with autism. Considering rapid technological progress, we focus (1) on studies published within the last 10 years (2009–2019), (2) on contact- and irritation-free sensor technology that does not constrain natural movement and interaction, and (3) on sensory input from the face, the voice, or body movements. We conclude that sensor technology has already demonstrated its great potential for improving both behavioral assessment and interventions in autism spectrum disorders. We also discuss selected examples for recent theoretical questions rel...
Our capacity to become aware of visual stimuli is limited. Investigating these limits, Cohen et a... more 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 suppression (CFS) task. They also found that more category-pair representational similarity in higher visual cortex was related to longer category-pair breakthrough times suggesting a high-level representational architecture bottleneck for visual awareness. As the cortical representations of hands and tools overlap, these categories are ideal to test this further. We conducted CFS experiments and predicted longer breakthrough times for hands/tools compared to other pairs. In contrast to these predictions, participants were generally faster at detecting targets masked by hands or tools compared to other mask categories when giving manual (Experiment...
A speaker's gaze behaviour can provide perceivers with a multitude of cues which are relevant... more A speaker's gaze behaviour can provide perceivers with a multitude of cues which are relevant for communication, thus constituting an important non-verbal interaction channel. The present study investigated whether direct eye gaze of a speaker affects the likelihood of listeners believing truth-ambiguous statements. Participants were presented with videos in which a speaker produced such statements with either direct or averted gaze. The statements were selected through a rating study to ensure that participants were unlikely to know a-priori whether they were true or not (e.g., "sniffer dogs cannot smell the difference between identical twins"). Participants indicated in a forced-choice task whether or not they believed each statement. We found that participants were more likely to believe statements by a speaker looking at them directly, compared to a speaker with averted gaze. Moreover, when participants disagreed with a statement, they were slower to do so when the...
Face aftereffects (e.g., expression aftereffects) can be simultaneously induced in opposite direc... more Face aftereffects (e.g., expression aftereffects) can be simultaneously induced in opposite directions for different face categories (e.g., male and female faces). Such aftereffects are typically interpreted as indicating that distinct neural populations code the categories on which adaptation is contingent, e.g., male and female faces. Moreover, they suggest that these distinct populations selectively respond to variations in the secondary stimulus dimension, e.g., emotional expression. However, contingent aftereffects have now been reported for so many different combinations of face characteristics, that one might question this interpretation. Instead, the selectivity might be generated during the adaptation procedure, for instance as a result of associative learning, and not indicate pre-existing response selectivity in the face perception system. To alleviate this concern, one would need to demonstrate some limit to contingent aftereffects. Here, we report a clear limit, showing...
Vocal emotion recognition (VER) in natural speech, often referred to as speech emotion recognitio... more 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 sets were used with machine-learning (ML) algorithms for discrete emotion classification. However, there is no consensus for which low-level-descriptors and classifiers are optimal. Therefore, we aimed to compare the performance of machine-learning algorithms with several different feature sets. Concretely, seven ML algorithms were compared on the Berlin Database of Emotional Speech: Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network (MLP), J48 Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machine with Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO), Random Forest (RF), k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Simple Logistic Regression (LOG) and Multinomial Logistic Regression (MLR) wit...
Since COVID-19 has become a pandemic, everyday life has seen dramatic changes affecting individua... more 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 of life for school-age autistic and neurotypical children and adolescents. First, we provide a comprehensive review of the current relevant literature. Next, we report original data from a survey conducted in several countries, assessing activities, well-being, and social life in families with autism, and their changes over time. We focus on differences between children with and without autism from within the same families, and on different outcomes for children with high- or low-functioning autism. While individuals with autism scored lower in emotional and social functioning than their neurotypical siblings, both groups of children show...
Background: Since COVID-19 has become pandemic, everyday life has seen dramatic changes affecting... more 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 effects of the pandemic on autistic and neurotypical (NT) children, and pursue a pre-registered hypothesis suggested by initial observations that some children with autism might respond comparatively well to a situation of constrained, predictable, and digital social communication during the pandemic. Methods: We provide a systematic review of current relevant work, including 76 papers selected from a database search until February 1, 2021. We then report survey data from several countries assessing activities, well-being (PedsQLTM), and social life in families with autism, and their respective change at various stages of the pandemic. We focus...
The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, ... more The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full DRO policy for further details.
Modifying established motor skills is a challenging endeavor due to proactive interference from u... more 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. Here we studied behavioral and EEG effects of rule changes to typing in skilled touch-typists. The respective rule change—typing without using the left index finger—was either implemented per instruction only or with an additional motor restriction. In both groups, the rule change elicited delays and more errors in typing, indicating the occurrence of proactive interference. While stimulus-locked ERPs did not exhibit prominent effects of rule change or group, response-locked ERPs revealed that the time courses of preparatory brain activity preceding typing responses depended on the presence of motor restriction. Although further research is...
The prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has increased strongly over the past decades, a... more 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 assessment of autism or with the aim to use this technology for intervention and support of people with autism. Considering rapid technological progress, we focus (1) on studies published within the last 10 years (2009–2019), (2) on contact- and irritation-free sensor technology that does not constrain natural movement and interaction, and (3) on sensory input from the face, the voice, or body movements. We conclude that sensor technology has already demonstrated its great potential for improving both behavioral assessment and interventions in autism spectrum disorders. We also discuss selected examples for recent theoretical questions rel...
Our capacity to become aware of visual stimuli is limited. Investigating these limits, Cohen et a... more 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 suppression (CFS) task. They also found that more category-pair representational similarity in higher visual cortex was related to longer category-pair breakthrough times suggesting a high-level representational architecture bottleneck for visual awareness. As the cortical representations of hands and tools overlap, these categories are ideal to test this further. We conducted CFS experiments and predicted longer breakthrough times for hands/tools compared to other pairs. In contrast to these predictions, participants were generally faster at detecting targets masked by hands or tools compared to other mask categories when giving manual (Experiment...
A speaker's gaze behaviour can provide perceivers with a multitude of cues which are relevant... more A speaker's gaze behaviour can provide perceivers with a multitude of cues which are relevant for communication, thus constituting an important non-verbal interaction channel. The present study investigated whether direct eye gaze of a speaker affects the likelihood of listeners believing truth-ambiguous statements. Participants were presented with videos in which a speaker produced such statements with either direct or averted gaze. The statements were selected through a rating study to ensure that participants were unlikely to know a-priori whether they were true or not (e.g., "sniffer dogs cannot smell the difference between identical twins"). Participants indicated in a forced-choice task whether or not they believed each statement. We found that participants were more likely to believe statements by a speaker looking at them directly, compared to a speaker with averted gaze. Moreover, when participants disagreed with a statement, they were slower to do so when the...
Face aftereffects (e.g., expression aftereffects) can be simultaneously induced in opposite direc... more Face aftereffects (e.g., expression aftereffects) can be simultaneously induced in opposite directions for different face categories (e.g., male and female faces). Such aftereffects are typically interpreted as indicating that distinct neural populations code the categories on which adaptation is contingent, e.g., male and female faces. Moreover, they suggest that these distinct populations selectively respond to variations in the secondary stimulus dimension, e.g., emotional expression. However, contingent aftereffects have now been reported for so many different combinations of face characteristics, that one might question this interpretation. Instead, the selectivity might be generated during the adaptation procedure, for instance as a result of associative learning, and not indicate pre-existing response selectivity in the face perception system. To alleviate this concern, one would need to demonstrate some limit to contingent aftereffects. Here, we report a clear limit, showing...
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Papers by Stefan Schweinberger