Response to own name in children: ERP study of auditory social information processing

Auditory event-related potentials based on name stimuli: A pilot study

In recent years, diagnostic studies of brain disorders based on auditory event-related potentials (AERP) have become a hot topic. Research showed that AERP might help to detect patient consciousness, especially using the subjects' own name (SON). In this study, we conducted a preliminary analysis of the brain response to Chinese name stimuli. Twelve subjects participated in this study. SONs were used as target stimuli for each trial. The names used for non-target stimuli were divided into three Chinese character names condition (3CC) and two Chinese characters names condition (2CC). Thus, each subject was required to be in active (silent counting) and passive mode (without counting) with four conditions [(passive, active) × (3CC, 2CC)]. We analyzed the spatio-temporal features for each condition, and we used SVM for target vs. non-target classification. The results showed that the passive mode under 3CC conditions showed a similar brain response to the active mode, and when 3CC was used as a non-target stimulus, the brain response induced by the target stimulus would have a better interaction than 2CC. We believe that the passive mode 3CC may be a good paradigm to replace the active mode which might need more attention from subjects. The results of this study can provide certain guidelines for the selection and optimization of the paradigm of auditory event-related potentials based on name stimulation.

Distinct Effects of Stimulus Repetition on Various Temporal Stages of Subject's Own Name Processing

The self is one of the most important concepts in psychology, which is of great significance for human survival and development. As an important self-related stimulus, the subject’s own name (SON) shows great advantages in cognitive and social processing and is widely used as an oddball stimulus in previous studies. However, it remained unknown whether the multiple repetition of stimulus would have similar influence on the neural response to SON and the other names under equal probability. In this study, adopting EEG and an equal–probability paradigm, we first detected the SON-related ERP components which could differentiate SON from other names, and then investigated how these components are influenced by repeated exposure of the stimulus. Our results showed that SON evoked an earlier SON-related negativity (SRN) at the fronto-central region and a late positive potential (LPP) at the centro-parietal region. More intriguingly, the earlier SRN demonstrated reduction after multiple repetitions, whereas LPP did not exhibit significant changes. In conclusion, these findings revealed that multiple repetitions of the stimulus might influence the various temporal stages in SON-related processing and highlighted the robustness of the late stage in this processing.

Did you say my name? Congruency of 12-month-old infants' behavioral and cardiac responses to name

Reduced orienting to name is an early behavioral risk marker for neurodevelopmental disorders. However, individual instances of infants' behavioral responses to name are limited in both reliability and predictive validity. Physiological responses such as heart rate (HR) deceleration may serve as more sensitive metrics than behavioral methods. As a first step toward validating HR deceleration as a candidate psychophysiological measure of name processing, we examined the congruency of behavioral and cardiac responses to name in 12-month-old typically developing infants. Infants exhibited greater median HR deceleration and spent a larger proportion of time in HR deceleration when they behaviorally oriented to their names than when they failed to do so; however, maximum HR deceleration was not related to behavioral responses. These findings provide preliminary evidence that specific HR deceleration metrics may be useful indices of infants' responses to name and may inform psychophysiological mechanisms underlying behavioral responses.

Neural Evidence for Speech Processing Deficits During a Cocktail Party Scenario in Minimally and Low Verbal Adolescents and Young Adults with Autism

As demonstrated by the Cocktail Party Effect, a person's attention is grabbed when they hear their name in a multispeaker setting. However, individuals with autism (ASD) are commonly challenged in multispeaker settings and often do not respond to salient speech, including one's own name (OON). It is unknown whether neural responses during this Cocktail Party scenario differ in those with ASD and whether such differences are associated with expressive language or auditory filtering abilities. We measured neural responses to hearing OON in quiet and multispeaker settings using electroencephalography in 20 minimally or low verbal ASD (ASD-MLV), 27 verbally fluent ASD (ASD-V), and 27 neurotypical (TD) participants, ages 13-22. First, we determined whether TD's neural responses to OON relative to other names could be quantified with early frontal mismatch responses (MMRs) and late, slow shift parietal and frontal responses (LPPs/FNs). Second, we compared the strength of MMRs and LPPs/FNs across the three groups. Third, we tested whether participants with poorer auditory filtering abilities exhibited particularly weak neural responses to OON heard in a multispeaker setting. Our primary finding was that TDs and ASD-Vs, but not ASD-MLVs, had significant MMRs to OON in a multispeaker setting, and strength of LPPs positively correlated with auditory filtering abilities in those with ASD. These findings reveal electrophysiological correlates of auditory filtering disruption within a clinical population that has severe language and communication impairments and offer a novel neuroimaging approach to studying the Cocktail Party effect in neurotypical and clinical populations. Autism Res 2020, 13: 1828-1842. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC. LAY SUMMARY: We found that minimally and low verbal adolescents and young adults with autism exhibit decreased neural responses to one's own name when heard in a multispeaker setting. In addition, decreased strength of neural responses in those with autism correlated with decreased auditory filtering abilities. We propose that these neural deficits may reflect the ineffective processing of salient speech in noisy settings and contribute to language and communication deficits observed in autism.

Study on the effect of nontarget types on name based auditory event-related potentials

Exploring the brain response to stimuli of healthy people in passive state is helpful to understand the brain response mechanism of unresponsive people. Event-related potential (ERP) can reflect the time synchronization of potentials, which is a feasible objective electrophysiological index reflecting the functional status of the brain. In this paper, we used the subjects' own name (SON) as target stimuli and compared with the nontarget stimuli (others' name) of Three Chinese Characters (3CC) and Two Chinese Characters (2CC) with the same stimuli duration (600ms) and inter stimuli interval (500ms-800ms）. Thirteen healthy subjects attended in this study with four conditions ( [active, passive]×[3CC, 2CC] ). We compared the ERP waveforms, the behavior performance, and the classification of four different conditions. ERP results show that the P300 amplitude of conditions with 3CC nontargets is higher than that of conditions with 2CC nontargets. Behavioral results show that the grand accuracy is 97% when the nontargets are 3CC, while the grand accuracy is only 94% when the nontargets are 2CC. The reaction time is also different from the two nontargets (605ms with 3CC vs 635ms with 2CC). Classification results illustrate that in active condition, the accuracy rate is 82.1% when the nontarget is 3CC, and that is 80.9% in passive condition, which are 4.2% and 6.4% higher than the accuracy rate under 2CC cases in both active and passive conditions. This study can provide a scheme for grading diagnosis of consciousness detection, and further applying to clinical evaluation.Clinical Relevance- This study can provide a better paradigm basis for clinical evaluation of unresponsive patients (such as disorder of consciousness, DOC) and may become an effective auxiliary means for clinical rating scales.

Development of neural responses to hearing their own name in infants at low and high risk for autism spectrum disorder

The own name is a salient stimulus, used by others to initiate social interaction. Typically developing infants orient towards the sound of their own name and exhibit enhanced event-related potentials (ERP) at 5 months. The lack of orientation to the own name is considered to be one of the earliest signs of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this study, we investigated ERPs to hearing the own name in infants at high and low risk for ASD, at 10 and 14 months. We hypothesized that low-risk infants would exhibit enhanced frontal ERP responses to their own name compared to an unfamiliar name, while high-risk infants were expected to show attenuation or absence of this difference in their ERP responses. In contrast to expectations, we did not find enhanced ERPs to own name in the low-risk group. However, the high-risk group exhibited attenuated frontal positive-going activity to their own name compared to an unfamiliar name and compared to the low-risk group, at the age of 14 months. These results suggest that infants at high risk for ASD start to process their own name differently shortly after one year of age, a period when frontal brain development is happening at a fast rate.

What's in a name? A preliminary event-related potential study of response to name in preschool children with and without autism spectrum disorder

The ability to selectively respond to one’s own name is important for social and language development, and is disrupted in atypically developing populations (e.g., autism spectrum disorder). Research with typically developing samples using event-related potentials (ERPs) has demonstrated that the subject’s own name (SON) is differentiated from other stimuli at both early sensory and later cognitive stages of auditory processing. While neural indices of response to name have been researched extensively in adults, no such studies have been conducted with typically developing preschool children or children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The present study investigated ERP response to name in a sample of typically developing (TD) preschoolers (n = 19; mean age = 4.3 years) as well as a small, exploratory comparison group of preschoolers with ASD (n = 13; mean age = 4.4 years). TD preschoolers exhibited significantly greater negativity to SON over frontal regions than to an unfamiliar nonsense name, consistent with the adult SON negativity component. This component was present whether the name was spoken by a parent or an unfamiliar adult, suggesting that it reflects SON-specific processing rather than broad self-relevant information processing. Comparing preschoolers with ASD to the TD children revealed a significant SON negativity component across both groups. The amplitude of the SON negativity response was significantly correlated with social variables in the ASD group, though these correlations did not survive correction for multiple comparisons. This study is the first to demonstrate the presence of the SON component in preschool children with and without ASD.

Social-emotional processing in nonverbal individuals with Angelman syndrome: evidence from brain responses to known and novel names

BACKGROUND

The combination of intellectual, communicative and motor deficits limits the use of standardised behavioural assessments in individuals with Angelman syndrome (AS). The current study aimed to objectively evaluate the extent of social-emotional processing in AS using auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) during passive exposure to spoken stimuli.

METHODS

Auditory ERP responses were recorded in 13 nonverbal individuals with the deletion subtype of AS, age 4-45 years, during the name recognition paradigm, in which their own names and names of close others (relative or friend) were presented among novel names. No behavioural responses were required.

RESULTS

Contrary to findings in typical children and adults, there was no significant evidence of differential neural response to known vs. novel names in participants with AS. Nevertheless, greater amplitude differences between known and unknown names demonstrated the predicted association with better interpersonal relationships and receptive communication abilities.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings indicate good tolerability of ERP procedures (85% success rate). The lack of own name differentiation is consistent with increased incidence of the autism-related symptoms in AS. Strong associations between the caregiver reports of adaptive functioning and neural indices of known name recognition support the utility of brain-based measures for objectively evaluating cognitive and affective processes in nonverbal persons with neurodevelopmental disorders.

Feasibility of using auditory event-related potentials to investigate learning and memory in nonverbal individuals with Angelman syndrome

The combination of intellectual, communicative, and motor deficits limit the use of standardized behavioral assessments of cognition in individuals with Angelman syndrome (AS). The current study is the first to objectively evaluate learning and memory in AS using auditory event-related potentials (ERP) during passive exposure to spoken stimuli. Fifteen nonverbal individuals with the deletion subtype of AS (age 4-45 years) completed the auditory incidental memory paradigm. Auditory ERPs were recorded in response to a sequence of unfamiliar nonwords, in which one randomly selected stimulus was repeated multiple times and the rest were presented once. Larger parietal responses within 200-500 ms for the repeated nonword compared to novel distracters were associated with caregiver reports of more adaptive communication skills. These findings demonstrate good tolerability of ERP procedures (94% success rate) and indicate that persons with AS can acquire new information following repeated auditory exposure, even in the absence of explicit memorization instructions. Strong associations between the caregiver reports of adaptive functioning and neural indices of auditory learning and memory support the utility of brain-based measures for objectively evaluating higher-order information processing in nonverbal persons with neurodevelopmental disorders.