Fig. 1.

Experimental design of the neuroimaging distance evaluation task. Participants were placed in a supine position in the scanner and instructed to focus on the distance of the auditorily presented prosody stimuli (/a/). They were instructed to focus on a white central fixation cross displayed via a rear-mounted projector and viewed through a head coil-mounted mirror. After the prosody offset, the white crosshair turned light gray, indicating that the participants had to respond. Auditory stimuli were presented through MR-compatible pneumatic headphones (MR confon GmbH, Germany). ISI represents inter-stimulus interval. The white bar of the ‘volumes acquired’ represents the onset used for the fMRI analyses.