Anecdotal and empirical evidence indicates that personally significant sounds, such as one's own name or ringtone, effectively capture attention. However, the time course and perceptual consequences of detecting these sounds, both voluntarily and involuntarily, remain unclear. This thesis presents three experiments using active and passive listening paradigms to explore this detection process through electrophysiological and psychophysical methods. Participants listened to their own mobile phone ringtones and those of others to assess personal significance. Experiment I utilized a classic oddball paradigm, revealing that the retrieval of sound features from long-term memory (LTM) occurred after physical deviance detection but before involuntary attentional orienting. In Experiment II, even without a physically salient deviation, the detection of a personally significant sound was replicated, with enhanced oscillatory activity (35-75 Hz) for one's own ringtone indicating an initial match between auditory input and memory templates. Experiment III employed a training approach, suggesting that the detection effect was not solely due to preferential processing of the self-selected stimulus. Behavioral detection thresholds indicated that individual experience with a sound might contribute to the "effect of the own name."
