Early ERP responses to own names while gaming

Calling and being called by one's own name play essential roles in our social life. In the study reported here, we investigated the possibility that own as opposed to other names would be automatically detected by mechanisms utilizing some initial acoustic indications. To this end, we examined early event-related potential responses (up to 400-ms latency) to one's own and other names while playing a video game with no sound effects. To test possible effects of emotion, we used name stimuli uttered by a female speaker in 3 emotional tones (angry, love, and neutral) and recruited 10 young male participants. We observed the modulation of the P1, P2, and N2 waves caused by the name-property manipulation (i.e., own VS. other names). The name-property effects did not significantly interact with the emotional tone factor. These automatic modulations may reflect early detection processes concerning signals of potential importance at multiple, perhaps initially coarse but later less coarse, processing stages. The paradigms using own and other names may provide unique ways both to investigate mechanisms by which personally/socially significant signals are processed and to assess neural circuitry in various neurological or developmental populations.