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Imagined speech influences perceived loudness of sound

Abstract

The way top-down and bottom-up processes interact to shape our perception and behaviour is a fundamental question and remains highly controversial. How early in a processing stream do such interactions occur, and what factors govern such interactions? The degree of abstractness of a perceptual attribute (for example, orientation versus shape in vision, or loudness versus sound identity in hearing) may determine the locus of neural processing and interaction between bottom-up and internal information. Using an imagery-perception repetition paradigm, we find that imagined speech affects subsequent auditory perception, even for a low-level attribute such as loudness. This effect is observed in early auditory responses in magnetoencephalography and electroencephalography that correlate with behavioural loudness ratings. The results suggest that the internal reconstruction of neural representations without external stimulation is flexibly regulated by task demands, and that such top-down processes can interact with bottom-up information at an early perceptual stage to modulate perception.

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Fig. 1: Experimental procedure and behavioural results for BE1 and BE2.
Fig. 2: Experimental procedure and behavioural results for BE3 and BE4.
Fig. 3: Neural adaptation results in the MEG experiment.
Fig. 4: Results of the EEG experiment.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Walker for technical support with MEG data collection, S. Yuan for help with running the EEG experiment, Q. Xu for help with running BE2–BE4 and L. Tao for comments and edits on an early draft. This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31500914 to X.T., and 31771248 and 31500873 to N.D.), the Major Program of the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (15JC1400104 and 17JC1404104), the Program of Introducing Talents of Discipline to Universities (Base B16018), a grant from the New York University Global Seed Grants for Collaborative Research (85-65701-G0757-R4551), the Joint Research Institute Seed Grants for Research Collaboration from the New York University-East China Normal University Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science at New York University, Shanghai (to X.T.), the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (LR16C090002), research funding from the State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Zhejiang University (to N.D.) and National Institutes of Health 2R01DC05660 (to D.P.). No funders had any role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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X.Tian conceived and designed the study, performed BE1 and the MEG experiments and analysed the data. F.B. performed BE2–BE4 and the EEG experiments. X.Tian, N.D., X.Teng and D.P. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Xing Tian.

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Tian, X., Ding, N., Teng, X. et al. Imagined speech influences perceived loudness of sound. Nat Hum Behav 2, 225–234 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0305-8

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