How the Non-attending Brain Hears Its Owner's Name

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Auditory Perception

Background:

• The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is crucial for self-recognition.
• It is unclear if unattended hearing of one's own name (SON) activates the mPFC.
• Previous research suggests SON captures attention, but the neural mechanisms are debated.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how attended and non-attended SON captures attention.
• To determine if non-attended SON activates the mPFC.
• To compare neural activation patterns for attended versus non-attended SON.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used.
• Participants performed a name-detection task (attended SON) and a tone-judgment task (non-attended SON).
• Identical auditory stimuli were presented in both conditions, manipulating task-relevance of SON.

Main Results:

• Attended SON activated the mPFC, supporting the hypothesis.
• Non-attended SON did not activate the mPFC.
• Non-attended SON activated subcortical and auditory cortical regions, including the midbrain reticular formation, thalamus, insula, auditory cortex, and precuneus.

Conclusions:

• Non-attended SON engages a cortico-subcortical auditory attention network for automatic detection.
• Attended SON specifically activates the mPFC, the key region for self-recognition.
• These findings explain the high salience of SON even when not actively attended to.