Isolating Neural Signatures of Conscious Speech Perception with a No-Report Sine-Wave Speech Paradigm

Identifying neural correlates of conscious perception is a fundamental endeavor of cognitive neuroscience. Most studies so far have focused on visual awareness along with trial-by-trial reports of task-relevant stimuli, which can confound neural measures of perceptual awareness with postperceptual p...

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Published inThe Journal of neuroscience Vol. 44; no. 8; p. e0145232023
Main Authors Zhu, Yunkai, Li, Charlotte, Hendry, Camille, Glass, James, Canseco-Gonzalez, Enriqueta, Pitts, Michael A, Dykstra, Andrew R
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Society for Neuroscience 21.02.2024
Subjects
Awareness - physiology
Cognitive ability
Consciousness - physiology
Electroencephalography - methods
Female
Humans
Male
Perception
Perceptions
Sine waves
Speech
Speech Perception
Visual perception
Visual Perception - physiology
awareness
consciousness
speech
EEG
perception
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Summary:Identifying neural correlates of conscious perception is a fundamental endeavor of cognitive neuroscience. Most studies so far have focused on visual awareness along with trial-by-trial reports of task-relevant stimuli, which can confound neural measures of perceptual awareness with postperceptual processing. Here, we used a three-phase sine-wave speech paradigm that dissociated between conscious speech perception and task relevance while recording EEG in humans of both sexes. Compared with tokens perceived as noise, physically identical sine-wave speech tokens that were perceived as speech elicited a left-lateralized, near-vertex negativity, which we interpret as a phonological version of a perceptual awareness negativity. This response appeared between 200 and 300 ms after token onset and was not present for frequency-flipped control tokens that were never perceived as speech. In contrast, the P3b elicited by task-irrelevant tokens did not significantly differ when the tokens were perceived as speech versus noise and was only enhanced for tokens that were both perceived as speech relevant to the task. Our results extend the findings from previous studies on visual awareness and speech perception and suggest that correlates of conscious perception, across types of conscious content, are most likely to be found in midlatency negative-going brain responses in content-specific sensory areas.
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This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant BCS-1829470 to M.A.P., University of Miami Institute for Data Science and Computing Collaborative Research Grant CD220005 to Y.Z. and A.R.D., University of Miami Provost’s Research Award UM PRA 2021-1882 to A.R.D., Reed College Science Research Fellowship for Faculty-Student Collaborative Research to C.L. and E.C.-G., and the Esther Hyatt Wender Fund for Collaborative Research in Psychology to J.G. and M.A.P.
E.C.-G., M.A.P., and A.R.D. contributed equally to this work.
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Author contributions: E.C.-G., M.A.P., and A.R.D. designed research; C.L., C.H., and J.G. performed research; Y.Z., C.L., C.H., and J.G. analyzed data; Y.Z. and A.R.D. wrote the first draft of the paper; Y.Z., C.L., E.C.-G., M.A.P., and A.R.D. edited the paper; Y.Z., E.C.-G., M.A.P., and A.R.D. wrote the paper.
ISSN:0270-6474
1529-2401
1529-2401
DOI:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0145-23.2023