The effects of stimulus complexity on the preattentive processing of self-generated and nonself voices: An ERP study

Abstract

The ability to differentiate one's own voice from the voice of somebody else plays a critical role in successful verbal self-monitoring processes and in communication. However, most of the existing studies have only focused on the sensory correlates of self-generated voice processing, whereas the effects of attentional demands and stimulus complexity on self-generated voice processing remain largely unknown. In this study, we investigated the effects of stimulus complexity on the preattentive processing of self and nonself voice stimuli. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 17 healthy males who watched a silent movie while ignoring prerecorded self-generated (SGV) and nonself (NSV) voice stimuli, consisting of a vocalization (vocalization category condition: VCC) or of a disyllabic word (word category condition: WCC). All voice stimuli were presented as standard and deviant events in four distinct oddball sequences. The mismatch negativity (MMN) ERP component peaked earlier for NSV than for SGV stimuli. Moreover, when compared with SGV stimuli, the P3a amplitude was increased for NSV stimuli in the VCC only, whereas in the WCC no significant differences were found between the two voice types. These findings suggest differences in the time course of automatic detection of a change in voice identity. In addition, they suggest that stimulus complexity modulates the magnitude of the orienting response to SGV and NSV stimuli, extending previous findings on self-voice processing.

Self-voice perception and its relationship with hallucination predisposition

“…For example, when judging the self-referential content of positive and negative words, participants were faster in judging positive words uttered by themselves than by an unknown speaker (Watson et al, 2007). Moreover, word discrimination was easier than vocalisation discrimination and agrees with prior studies that showed that the processing of speech (with verbal content) compared to vocalisations (no verbal content) is subserved by different neurocognitive mechanisms (Belin et al, 2004;Conde et al, 2015;Pell et al, 2015). Contrary to our hypothesis and prior evidence (Chhabra et al, 2014), we observed that discrimination was affected by HP.…”

“…Overall, discrimination was affected by stimulus type, voice identity, and the emotional quality (valence) of the voice: judgments of acoustic similarity were improved when participants listened to words rather than vocalisations and specifically when positive content words were uttered by the participant. The results of the discrimination task (involving a simple differentiation of self and other voices) agree with a noted processing advantage associated with self-generated voices (e.g., Conde et al, 2015). One's own voice represents a more familiar signal, which is more easily matched with speaker-specific stored representations (Belin et al, 2011;Blank, 2002;Nakamura et al, 2001).…”

“…The mechanisms involved in self-voice perception could be modulated by the type of vocal stimulus as well as by task instructions. Prior studies have shown that both stimulus type (e.g., vocal sounds with [words] vs. without [vocalisations] semantic content) and attentional focus demanded by the task (e.g., attention directed to the voice or to a concurrent visual stimulus) affect self-other voice discrimination (Conde, Gonçalves, & Pinheiro, 2015). Differences in the neurocognitive mechanisms subserving the processing of speech and nonverbal vocalisations have also been shown (e.g., Pell & Kotz, 2011).…”

The processing of intimately familiar and unfamiliar voices: Specific neural responses of speaker recognition and identification

“…These results confirmed a previous report of a distinct process between self and familiar voices [4]. On the other hand, given that externally generated familiar voices are never heard as self-generated voices, it is difficult to extrapolate results on self voices to processes of voice recognition and identification [and see [57][58][59][60]. On their side, Holeckova, Fischer [61], after exposing participants to their own name pronounced by intimately familiar and unfamiliar speakers, reported a small effect on the P3, between 300 and 380 ms, but mostly on later-occuring ERP between 625 and 800.…”

EEG Spatiotemporal Patterns Underlying Self-other Voice Discrimination

“…For example, the amplitude of the P3a component in a passive oddball paradigm was observed to be lower for self-voice, compared to unfamiliar (Graux et al 2013) and familiar voices (Graux et al 2015), suggesting less pre-attentional processes being involved in the discrimination of one's own voice. (Conde et al 2016) confirmed this finding and narrowed the P3 reduction down to experimental stimuli consisting of simple vocalizations, compared to words. However, in active oddball paradigms requiring attentional processes, the P3 amplitude increased for self-voices compared to other voices, indicating that one's own voice has a greater affective salience than an unfamiliar voice (Conde et al 2015(Conde et al , 2018.…”