Unexpected Sounds Nonselectively Inhibit Active Visual Stimulus Representations

Sounds facilitate visual motion discrimination via the enhancement of late occipital visual representations

Sensory discriminations, such as judgements about visual motion, often benefit from multisensory evidence. Despite many reports of enhanced brain activity during multisensory conditions, it remains unclear which dynamic processes implement the multisensory benefit for an upcoming decision in the human brain. Specifically, it remains difficult to attribute perceptual benefits to specific process...

Preperceptual and Stimulus-Selective Enhancement of Low-Level Human Visual Cortex Excitability by Sounds

Evidence of multisensory interactions within low-level cortices and at early post-stimulus latencies has prompted a paradigm shift in conceptualizations of sensory organization. However, the mechanisms of these interactions and their link to behavior remain largely unknown. One behaviorally salient stimulus is a rapidly approaching (looming) object, which can indicate potential threats. Based o...

Acquired equivalence changes stimulus representations.

Acquired equivalence is a paradigm in which generalization is increased between two superficially dissimilar stimuli (or antecedents) that have previously been associated with similar outcomes (or consequents). Several possible mechanisms have been proposed, including changes in stimulus representations, either in the form of added associations or a change of feature salience. A different way o...

Active Measurement of Contact Sounds

We describe a novel system for robotic measurement of contact sounds. This system is well suited for acquiring impulse-response sound models. A brief explanation of the sound models is included. We also describe experimental results to illustrate the process of acquiring sound models using our system, and a brief analysis of the results. The initial results are promising and could lead to appli...

Latency Phenomena in Prolonged Learning of Visual Representations of Russian Sounds