Breathing affects self-other voice discrimination in a bodily state with increased otherness

A growing number of studies have focused on identifying cognitive processes that are modulated by interoceptive signals, particularly in relation to the respiratory or cardiac cycle. Considering the fundamental role of interoception in bodily self-consciousness, we here investigated whether interoceptive signals also impact self-voice perception. We applied an interactive, robotic paradigm associated with somatic passivity (a bodily state characterized by illusory misattribution of self-generated touches to someone else) to investigate whether somatic passivity impacts self-voice perception as a function of concurrent interoceptive signals. Participants’ breathing and heartbeat signals were recorded while they performed two self-voice tasks (self-other voice discrimination and loudness perception) and while simultaneously experiencing two robotic conditions (somatic passivity condition; control condition). Our data reveal that respiration, but not cardiac activity, affects self-voice perception: participants were better at discriminating self-voice from another person’s voice during the inspiration phase of the respiration cycle. Moreover, breathing effects were prominent in participants experiencing somatic passivity and a different task with the same stimuli (i.e., judging the loudness and not identity of the voices) was unaffected by breathing. Combining interoception and voice perception with self-monitoring framework, these data extend findings on breathing-dependent changes in perception and cognition to self-related processing.

众多研究致力于识别受内感受信号调节的认知过程，尤其是与呼吸或心脏循环相关的方面。鉴于内感受在身体自我意识中的基础性作用，本研究旨在探讨内感受信号是否也会影响自我声音感知。本研究采用与躯体被动性（一种将自我产生的触觉错误地归因于他人的身体状态）相关的交互式机器人范式，以探究躯体被动性是否会影响自我声音感知，并以此作为同时出现的内感受信号的函数。在参与者执行两项自我声音任务（自我与他人声音辨别和响度感知）的同时，记录了他们的呼吸和心跳信号，并让他们同时经历两种机器人条件（躯体被动性条件；对照组）。我们的数据显示，呼吸而非心脏活动会影响自我声音感知：在呼吸周期的吸气阶段，参与者能够更好地辨别自我声音与他人的声音。此外，在经历躯体被动性的参与者中，呼吸的影响尤为显著；而在同一刺激下进行不同任务（即判断声音的响度而非身份）时，呼吸的影响并未受到影响。将内感受、声音感知与自我监控框架相结合，这些数据将关于呼吸依赖性感知和认知变化的发现扩展到自我相关处理。