Three experiments investigated the nature of visuo-auditory crossmodal cueing in a triadic setting: participants had to detect an auditory signal while observing another agent's head facing one of the two laterally positioned auditory sources. Experiment 1 showed that when the agent's eyes were open, sounds originating on the side of the agent's gaze were detected faster than sounds originating...

It is well known that the planum temporale (PT) area in the posterior temporal lobe carries out spectro-temporal analysis of auditory stimuli, which is crucial for speech, for example. There are suggestions that the PT is also involved in auditory attention, specifically in the discrimination and selection of stimuli from the left and right ear. However, direct evidence is missing so far. To ex...

Dichotic word recognition was evaluated in free-recall, directed-attention right, and directed-attention left response conditions. All participants were right-handed and included a group of young adults with normal hearing and two groups of older adults with sensorineural hearing loss. Dichotic word recognition performance was best for young adults and decreased for each older group. A right-ea...

About 30 percent of Medicare beneficiaries enroll in private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans but do so at a relatively high-cost. This paper explores the advantages and challenges of introducing competitive bidding among MA plans (Plan One) or among MA plans and Fee-for-Service (Plan Two or Premium Support). We conclude that competitive bidding could reduce the cost of Medicare, especially in den...

In dichotic listening, a right ear advantage for linguistic tasks reflects left hemisphere specialization, and a left ear advantage for prosodic tasks reflects right hemisphere specialization. Three experiments used a response hand manipulation with a dichotic listening task to distinguish between direct access (relative specialization) and callosal relay (absolute specialization) explanations ...

Present data support the conclusion that protons serve as an important neurotransmitter to convey excitatory stimuli from inner ear type I vestibular hair cells to postsynaptic calyx nerve terminals. Time-resolved pH imaging revealed stimulus-evoked extrusion of protons from hair cells and a subsequent buildup of [H(+)] within the confined chalice-shaped synaptic cleft (ΔpH ∼ -0.2). Whole-cell ...

Contribution of the left ear stimulus to dichotic listening performance following commissurotomy was studied in five patients. In two tasks, subjects were asked to identify in writing both members of a pair of competing stimuli, either digits or CV syllables. A third task required subjects to integrate high and low frequency components of a single word presented dichotically. Left ear performan...

Duplex perception is the simultaneous perception of a speech syllable and of a nonspeech "chirp," and occurs when a single formant transition and the remainder (the "base") of a synthetic syllable are presented to different ears. The current study found a slight but nonsignificant advantage for correct labeling of the fused syllable when the chirp was presented to the left ear. This advantage w...

The role of the left cerebral hemisphere for the discrimination of duration was examined in a group of normal subjects. Two tasks were presented: the first required a reaction-time response to the offset of monaural pulse sequences varying in interpulse duration, and the second required the discrimination of small differences in durations, within a delayed-comparison paradigm. In each task a ri...

In this article we review research in our laboratory on auditory hallucinations using behavioral and MRI measure. The review consists of both previously published and new data that for the first time is presented together in a cohesive way. Auditory hallucinations are among the most common symptoms in schizophrenia, affecting more than 70% of the patients. We here advance the hypothesis that au...