The present study's basic research question concerns differences in the processing of verbal and tonal stimuli in working memory. Participants had to rehearse sequences containing tonal and verbal information and to decide whether a subsequently presented probe stimulus belonged to the previously presented sequence. Electrophysiological measures were taken and analysed with regard to local (eve...

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the role of interactivity (the use of pen and paper) in defusing the impact of stereotype threat on difficult mental arithmetic tasks, covering all four operations of mathematics. Eighty-four 16-year-old girls from secondary schools in South East England (UK) participated in this study. Participants carried out (in an educational setting) diff...

Accurate and effective voice activity detection (VAD) is a fundamental step for robust speech or speaker recognition. In this study, we proposed a hierarchical framework approach for VAD and speech enhancement. The modified Wiener filter (MWF) approach is utilized for noise reduction in the speech enhancement block. For the feature selection and voting block, several discriminating features wer...

This paper introduces the topic of " Collaborative Distance " within Distributed Collaboration as being an introduction to this Special Issue on Collaborative Working Environments 1 (CWE). It starts in discussing various related concepts, identified during an extensive literature review, on both proximity and distance in distributed collaboration. Then, a Collaborative Distance Framework (CDF) ...

We propose a new approach to commutative watermarkingencryption (CWE). A permutation cipher is used to encrypt the multimedia data, which leaves the global statistics of the multimedia data intact. Therefore, any non-localized watermarking scheme that depends only on global statistics of the multimedia data can be combined with the permutation cipher to form a CWE scheme. We demonstrate this ap...

This study investigated feature binding in a working memory task in patients with schizophrenia and in normal controls. Twenty-five patients and 25 controls participated. On each trial, three drawings of familiar objects were presented sequentially, each in a different cell of a 3 x 3 grid. In different blocks of trials, participants remembered either individual features (object and location co...