Sebastian Andric

Graduate Student
McGill Univ
Email author

Dynamics of Pupillary Responses to Contextual Speech Predictions

Sebastian Andric, Peter Donhauser, Sylvain Baillet

I am a M.Sc. student in the Integrated Program of Neuroscience at McGill University. I completed my B.Sc. in Neuroscience at McGill as a undergraduate researcher with the Sequence Production Lab. Here I was investigating the influence of circadian rhythms on spontaneous production rates during musical performance. Currently, I am at the NeuroSPEED lab in the Montreal Neurological Institute studying contextual speech predictions and how they are related to brain and autonomic signals.

Dynamics of Pupillary Responses to Contextual Speech Predictions

Sebastian Andric, Peter Donhauser, Sylvain Baillet
Abstract

Internal representations of the environment may alleviate sensory processing by modulating the gain of incoming information through predictive coding mechanisms. Previous research has has shown that contextual predictions modulate neural signals and that pupil diameter increases during unpredictable audio events. Here, we investigated whether contextual speech predictions modulate pupillary dynamics. A neural-network language model was trained on the speech data form the TED-LIUM corpus to generate phoneme-level predictions manifested as uncertainty and surprise. Video of subject's pupils was obtained during speech-listening. Then, pupillary dynamics were modeled as a linear combination of speech-audio content and contextual speech predictions. However, surprise and uncertainty regressors did not improve modeling of the pupil signal. Further work will assess simpler predictive coding models against the speech-audio model, with the eventual goal of relating pupil dynamics with predictive neural signals. 

Poster