DEC Colloquium

Inner speech in action: EMG data during verbal thought and auditory verbal hallucination

Speaker(s)
Hélène Loevenbruck (Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition, Grenoble)
Practical information
15 October 2013
11:30am-1pm
Place

Salle Langevin

Inner speech refers to the silent production of words in one’s mind. It plays a central role in human consciousness at the interplay of language and thought and it has been described as a kind of motor action. An influential motor control model (the ‘predictive model’) claims that when motor commands are sent to the motor system to achieve an intended state, an efference copy is issued in parallel. This efference copy is used to calculate a prediction of the sensory outcome of the motor plan. It is suggested that if the actual sensory feedback matches the predicted outcome then self-authorship is experienced. This model has been extended to inner speech and it has been suggested that a defective efference copy could underlie auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) in schizophrenia, with self-initiated covert verbal actions experienced as originating from an external cause. In this talk, I will present labial EMG data that suggest that wilful inner speech can be regarded as a kind of action and AVHs as disrupted inner speech.