Research has shown that the processing of the sensory consequences resulting from self-initiated sounds is attenuated as evidenced by the auditory N1 suppression effect. A similar effect has also been demonstrated in the visual domain, but in this case, a self-initiated picture triggered either an attenuated or enlarged N1 response. In the present study, we investigated the processing of self-initiated multisensory audiovisual stimuli.
The study comprised three conditions of self-initiated stimuli, namely, self-initiated sounds (auditory), self-initiated Gabor patches (visual), and simultaneously occurring self-initiated sounds and Gabor patches (audiovisual). For each condition, self-initiated sensory consequences and externally-initiated sensory consequences were collected in separate blocks. N1 differences between the self-initiated and externally-initiated blocks were observed for all three conditions. The talk will further discuss the role of sensory N1 suppression across the different modalities.