Abstract
It has been demonstrated that unexpected alterations in auditory feedback elicit fast compensatory adjustments in vocal production. Although generally thought to be involuntary in nature, whether these adjustments can be influenced by cognitive function such as attention remains unknown. The present event-related potential (ERP) study investigated whether neurobehavioral processing of auditory-vocal integration can be affected by attention. While sustaining a vowel phonation and hearing pitch-shifted feedback, participants were required to either ignore the auditory feedback perturbation, or attend to it with two levels of attention load. The results revealed enhancement of P2 response to the attended auditory perturbation with the low load level as compared to the unattended auditory perturbation. Moreover, increased auditory attention load led to a significant decrease of P2 response. By contrast, there was no attention-related change of vocal response. These findings provide the first neurophysiological evidence that involuntary auditory-vocal integration can be modulated as a function of auditory attention. Furthermore, it is suggested that auditory attention load can result in a decrease of the cortical processing of auditory-vocal integration in pitch regulation.
Published Version
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