Sensory suppression effects to self-initiated sounds reflect the attenuation of the unspecific N1 component of the auditory ERP.
The suppression of the auditory N1 event-related potential (ERP) to self-initiated sounds became a popular tool to tap into sensory-specific forward modeling. It is assumed that processing in the auditory cortex is attenuated due to a match between sensory stimulation and a specific sensory prediction afforded by a forward model of the motor command. The present study shows that N1 suppression was dramatically increased with long (≈ 3 s) stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA), whereas P2 suppression was equal in all SOA conditions (0.8, 1.6, 3.2 s). Thus, the P2 was found to be more sensitive to self-initiation effects than the N1 with short SOAs. Moreover, only the unspecific but not the sensory-specific N1 components were suppressed for self-initiated sounds suggesting that N1-suppression effects mainly reflect an attenuated orienting response. We argue that the N1-suppression effect is a rather indirect measure of sensory-specific forward models.
Institute for Psychology, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany. iria.sanmiguel@uni-leipzig.de
Iria
I
SanMiguel
Juanita
J
Todd
Erich
E
Schröger
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012094:Repression, Psychology; D013016:Sound; D014831:Voice / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult