Neural mechanisms underlying the orienting response to subject's own name: an event-related potential study.

Neural processes underlying the orienting response (OR) to subject's own name (SON) were investigated using the oddball paradigm. Subjects were presented with SON, subject's parent's name, and unfamiliar persons' names while they played a video game and ignored the auditory stimuli. A P3a-like frontal positivity (P440, 440 ms) indexing OR was elicited by SON only when it was the rare stimulus and its amplitude decreased with the repeated presentation of SON. Preceding the P440, SON consistently elicited an early frontal negativity (SON negativity, 170-270 ms), including when SON was the high-probability stimulus, and unlike the P440, this negativity did not habituate. These results conform to the hypothesis that early preattentive processing of speech sounds distinguishes SON from other names irrespective of short-term stimulus context, and that this culminates in an OR only when SON is evaluated as being contextually meaningful.