Self‐initiated actions result in suppressed auditory but amplified visual evoked components in healthy participants

Abstract

Self-suppression refers to the phenomenon that sensations initiated by our own movements are typically less salient, and elicit an attenuated neural response, compared to sensations resulting from changes in the external world. Evidence for self-suppression is provided by previous ERP studies in the auditory modality, which have found that healthy participants typically exhibit a reduced auditory N1 component when auditory stimuli are self-initiated as opposed to externally initiated. However, the literature investigating self-suppression in the visual modality is sparse, with mixed findings and experimental protocols. An EEG study was conducted to expand our understanding of self-suppression across different sensory modalities. Healthy participants experienced either an auditory (tone) or visual (pattern-reversal) stimulus following a willed button press (self-initiated), a random interval (externally initiated, unpredictable onset), or a visual countdown (externally initiated, predictable onset-to match the intrinsic predictability of self-initiated stimuli), while EEG was continuously recorded. Reduced N1 amplitudes for self- versus externally initiated tones indicated that self-suppression occurred in the auditory domain. In contrast, the visual N145 component was amplified for self- versus externally initiated pattern reversals. Externally initiated conditions did not differ as a function of their predictability. These findings highlight a difference in sensory processing of self-initiated stimuli across modalities, and may have implications for clinical disorders that are ostensibly associated with abnormal self-suppression.

Action‐associated modulation of visual event‐related potentials evoked by abstract and ecological stimuli

“…Finally, although we observed numerically larger N1 amplitudes for checkerboards elicited by the dominant hand, resembling the effect reported by Mifsud and colleagues (), the comparison between PV and C‐MI conditions was not significant (similar to the study by Hughes & Waszak, ). This finding was also confirmed by our Bayesian analysis, either suggesting inconclusive evidence for action‐related N1 modulation (Experiment 1) or moderate evidence against such an effect (Experiment 2).…”

“…In a very similar vein, Hughes and Waszak () proposed attentional orientation toward self‐generated stimuli as a potential cause for enhanced P1 amplitudes, since this component was shown to be increased for temporally anticipated visual events (Correa, Lupiáñez, Madrid, & Tudela, ; Doherty, Rao, Mesulam, & Nobre, ). Finally, the role of attentional processes was emphasized by Mifsud and colleagues (), observing larger amplitudes for the occipital N145 (rather than for the P1) in their “self‐initiated” condition. However, to control for temporal predictability, these authors also included an experimental condition in which stimulus onset was externally cued to aid the buildup of anticipation.…”

“…Ocular artifacts (primarily related to blinking) and other generic discontinuities were removed with independent component analysis (ICA) implemented in the ADJUST 1.1 plug‐in for EEGLAB (Mognon, Jovicich, Bruzzone, & Buiatti, ). Although removing eye movement‐related EEG artifacts using ICA or other regression‐based methods is a standard procedure in visual experiments of similar nature (Benazet et al, ; Gentsch, Kathmann, et al, ; Gentsch & Schütz‐Bosbach, ; Gentsch, Schütz‐Bosbach, et al, ; Hughes & Waszak, ; Mifsud et al, ; Roussel et al, ), we compared the number of epochs with such artifacts between experimental conditions to ensure that stimulus processing was not substantially affected by eye movements. Using the ICA‐based algorithm, the number of epochs corrected for ocular artifacts per experimental condition (i.e., 100 trials) in the time range between 100 ms pre‐ and 200 ms poststimulus onset was negligible ( M = 2.3, SD = 4.9), being similar across conditions (univariate analysis of variance test; main effect of condition—8 levels: 2 PV, 2 MI‐left, 2 MI‐right, MO‐left, MO‐right): F (7, 128) = 1.87, p = 0.08, = 0.09.…”

The function and failure of sensory predictions

“…These findings indicate that action‐related predictive mechanisms might lead to suppression in multiple modalities. However, direct evidence for attenuation of cortical activity in the visual domain is sparse; indeed, some studies have revealed increased visual cortical activity following self‐initiated actions in humans and awake‐behaving mice potentially indicating differential processing of self‐initiated sensory stimuli across modalities.…”

Learning-Related Brain-Electrical Activity Dynamics Associated with the Subsequent Impact of Learnt Action-Outcome Associations

“…Specifically, action outcomes are perceived to be attenuated and shifted in time compared to stimuli that are unpredicted or predicted by other stimuli rather than one’s own actions (Von Holst and Mittelstaedt, 1950; Weiskrantz et al, 1971; Blakemore et al, 1998; Haggard et al, 2002). This is a widespread phenomenon that has not only been assessed behaviorally but also neuro-physiologically using different techniques (Schafer and Marcus, 1973; McCarthy and Donchin, 1976; Martikainen et al, 2005; Aliu et al, 2009; Reznik et al, 2014; Timm et al, 2014), including a number of recent EEG studies (Lange, 2011; Desantis et al, 2012; Hughes et al, 2013a,b; SanMiguel et al, 2013; Mifsud et al, 2016; Timm et al, 2016). When outcomes are sounds as in most previous studies, the typical finding are reduced outcome-evoked ERP amplitudes within the latency range of the N1 and P2 components at fronto-central electrodes.…”