Specificity in the processing of a subject’s own name

Abstract

Subject’s own name (SON) is widely used in both daily life and the clinic. Event-related potential (ERP)-based studies have previously detected several ERP components related to SON processing; however, as most of these studies used SON as a deviant stimulus, it was not possible to determine whether these components were SON-specific. To identify SON-specific ERP components, we adopted a passive listening task with EEG data recording involving 25 subjects. The auditory stimuli were a SON, a friend’s name (FN), an unfamiliar name (UN) selected from other subjects’ names and seven different unfamiliar names (DUNs). The experimental settings included Equal-probabilistic, Frequent-SON, Frequent-FN and Frequent-UN conditions. The results showed that SON consistently evoked a frontocentral SON-related negativity (SRN) within 210–350 ms under all conditions, which was not detected with the other names. Meanwhile, a late positive potential evoked by SON was found to be affected by stimulus probability, showing no significant difference between the SON and the other names in the Frequent-SON condition, or between the SON and a FN in the Frequent-UN condition. Taken together, our findings indicated that the SRN was a SON-specific ERP component, suggesting that distinct neural mechanism underly the processing of a SON.