Principal component analysis reveals differential attentional modulation of the vocal response to pitch perturbation

The auditory-vocal system modifies voice fundamental frequency (F0) with auditory feedback. The responses to F0 changes in auditory feedback are known to depend on the task. The hypothesis explored in this study is that the task dependency is the result of multiple components of the F0 responses differently modulated with different tasks. Attention to audition was manipulated by task condition by the instruction to ignore or to count the number of the F0 shifts heard during vocalization. A synthetic voice with pitch shifts was used as auditory pseudo-feedback. The upward and downward shifts evoked very similar vocal F0 response patterns with polarity reversal. Attention to the auditory feedback caused a reduction in the grand-average response amplitude. By decomposing the F0 responses with principal component analysis (PCA), three principal components (PCs) with different peak latencies were found to have contributions above the criterion of 5%, totaling to 74%. All three PCs contributed to a compensatory response under the "ignore" condition. The slowest PC changed its polarity and the intermediate PC was reduced to almost zero under the "count" condition. Thus, the task-dependency of the F0 response to auditory feedback can be described in terms of different sensitivities of components to attention.