The temporal relationship between different stages of cognitive processing is long debated. This debate is ongoing, primarily because it is often difficult to measure the time course of multiple cognitive processes simultaneously. We employed a manipulation that allowed us to isolate ERP components related to perceptual processing, working memory, and response preparation, and then examined the...

The influence of semantic context on word identification was examined using masked target displays. Related prime words enhanced a signal detection measure of sensitivity in making lexical decisions and in determining whether a probe word matched the target word. When line drawings were used as primes, a similar benefit was obtained with the probe task. Although these results suggest that conte...

Previous studies on perceptual learning, acquiring a new skill through practice, appear to stimulate brain plasticity and enhance performance (Fiorentini & Berardi, 1981). The present study aimed to determine (a) whether perceptual learning can be used to compensate for age-related declines in perceptual abilities, and (b) whether the effect of perceptual learning can be transferred to untraine...

In concatenative synthesis, new utterances are created by concatenating segments (units) of recorded speech. When the segments are extracted from a large speech corpus, a key issue is to select segments that will sound natural in a given phonetic context. Distance measures are often used for this task. However, little is known about the perceptual relevance of these measures. More insight into ...

Distance measures are used to specify the (amount of) (dis)similarity between (two) events, on the basis of specific properties. This definition of distance measures makes it possible to emphasis various characteristics which I consider to be important. In the speech domain one can replace the general term 'event' in this definition by '(multidimensional) speech signal'. Uni-dimensional physica...

The design of lter banks for source coding purposes classically relies on the perfect reconstruction (PR) property. However, several recent studies have shown that taking the quantization noise into account in the design could yield noticeable reduction of the mean square reconstruction error. The purpose of this study is to show that perceptual improvement can also be obtained in the particula...

The traditional method of single stimuli for measuring perceptual illusions and context effects confounds perceptual effects with changes in the observer's decision criterion. By deciding consciously or unconsciously to select one of the two response alternatives more than the other when unsure of the correct response, the observer can shift his or her psychometric function in a manner indistin...

In concatenative synthesis, new utterances are created by concatenating segments (units) of recorded speech. When the segments are extracted from a large speech corpus, a key issue is to select segments that will sound natural in a given phonetic context. Distance measures are often used for this task. However, little is known about the perceptual relevance of these measures. More insight into ...

Brain activity during wakefulness is characterized by rapid fluctuations in neuronal responses. Whether these fluctuations play any role in modulating the accuracy of behavioral responses is poorly understood. Here, we investigated whether and how trial changes in the population response impact sensory coding in monkey V1 and perceptual performance. Although the responses of individual neurons ...

Perceptual closure is one of the principles by which the visual system groups disjointed contour segments belonging to a single object. Recently it has been reported that grouping based on perceptual closure operates only upon contour elements of a consistent contrast sign and is eliminated when closed contours contain contrast reversing segments [Elder, J. & Zucker, S. (1994) A measure of clos...