Enhanced Neural Responses to Self-Name Stimuli Relative to Tone and Reversed Speech Deviants in the Auditory Oddball Paradigm

Background: Auditory oddball paradigms are widely used to investigate neural responses to deviant stimuli and attentional processing. However, different paradigms involve deviant stimuli with varying levels of stimulus relevance, and the corresponding neural responses have rarely been directly compared within a unified experimental framework. The aim of this study was to compare neural responses elicited by three variants of the auditory oddball paradigm that differ in the type of deviant stimuli: tone, reversed speech, and self-name deviants. Methods: Electroencephalography (EEG) data were recorded from 38 healthy participants while they performed three paradigm variants. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were analyzed to examine neural responses to deviant stimuli. In addition, cortical activation patterns were identified via source reconstruction, and classification analyses were conducted to assess the discriminability of neural responses across the three variants. Results: ERP results revealed that the self-name paradigm elicited the most robust neural signatures, characterized by a significant P300 amplitude (3.95 μV) and prominent MMN (-6.39 μV). Crucially, source-space analysis revealed a graded expansion of cortical recruitment: acoustic deviance (tone) and structural reanalysis (reversed speech) were associated with 7 and 6 significant clusters, respectively, primarily in the auditory and fronto-cingulate cortices, whereas the self-name paradigm engaged 12 significant clusters spanning a distributed salience–self network (including the insula and posterior cingulate cortex). Classification analyses mirrored these findings: the self-name paradigm consistently yielding the highest neural separability (~80% accuracy) and greater robustness to interindividual variability, particularly when the EEGNet architecture was used. Conclusions: These findings demonstrate that self-referential auditory stimuli elicit stronger and more discriminable neural responses than other auditory deviant stimuli in the oddball paradigm. These results provide a comparative perspective on how different dimensions of auditory relevance modulate neural processing and may inform the design of effective auditory paradigms for cognitive neuroscience and related translational applications.