Did you hear what you said? Inattentional deafness of pitch shifts in self- produced vocalization

In everyday life, we normally do not pay attention to the sensory consequences of our ownactions such as the sound of our own voice. In some situations, however, such as whenrequired to speak a language we are not adept in, our attention is strongly drawn to ourown voice. Yet, even though attention is one of the most thoroughly studied phenomena incognitive psychology, and known to strongly modulate behavior, relatively little is knownabout how attention influences the processing of sensory consequences of our ownactions. We show that when participants’ attention was sufficiently strongly directed to avisual task, many individuals (50% out of 34) failed to notice that the pitch of their ownvoice was unexpectedly and significantly pitch shifted (75 cents; the individuals had notrouble detecting the pitch shift when they knew to expect it). The participants whonoticed the pitch shift made transient adjustments to the pitch of their voice, whereas the“inattentionally deaf” participants produced longer lasting (up to 800 ms after the pitchshift) adjustments to their voice. Our results demonstrate that our awareness of our ownvoice can strongly depend on if we attend it or not, which can have significantconsequences on feedback motor control.