EXPRESON-IN : Intracerebral Recordings of P3a Responses to Expressive Own-names

Late auditory evoked potentials (as P3 wave) are used in neurophysiology to assess the level of consciousness in DOC (disorder of consciousness) patients. The P3 wave, elicited by listening standard and deviant stimuli, corresponds to the activation of a frontoparietal network and is considered to reflect a cognitive attention task. Using the own name of the patient as deviant stimuli improve the ability to detect the P3 wave because of the particularly relevance of this stimulus for the patient. In human cognition, to identify the expressivity valence of a voice is essential. Neural processing of expressive voices should involves more widespread brain areas than neutral voices processing. Here the investigators investigate the intracerebral correlates of the P3a responses recorded on the scalp to own-name stimuli uttered by neutral and more expressive voices (positive : smiling voice or negative : rough voice) in adult pharmacoresistant epilepsy patients.