When a brief flash appears at the same position as a moving object, the flash is perceived to lag behind. This so-called flash-lag effect tells us something about the perception of space and time: where is the moving object when the flash appears? A recent paper by Alais and Burr on auditory and crossmodal flash-lag effects indicates that our (often implicit) models of the perception of space a...

This paper explores whether auditory and proprioceptive information can be used to bootstrap learning about how objects interact with water. Our results demonstrate that a robot can categorize objects into “containers” and “noncontainers” based on how the objects sound like and feel like when water is flowing onto them. Using a behavior–grounded approach, the robot performed five different expl...

This paper proposes a method for interactive recognition of household objects using proprioceptive and auditory feedback. In our experiments, the robot observed the changes in its proprioceptive and auditory sensory streams while performing five exploratory behaviors (lift, shake, drop, crush, and push) on 50 common household objects (e.g., bottles, cups, balls, toys, etc.). The robot was taske...

Three experiments investigating the basis of induced motion are reported. The proposition that induced motion is based on the visual capture of eye-position information and is therefore a subject-relative, rather than object-relative, motion was explored in the first experiment. Observers made saccades to an invisible auditory stimulus following fixation on a stationary stimulus in which motion...

Cortical regions engaged by sentence processing were mapped using functional MRI. The influence of input modality (spoken word vs. print input) and parsing difficulty (sentences containing subject-relative vs. object-relative clauses) was assessed. Auditory presentation was associated with pronounced activity at primary auditory cortex and across the superior temporal gyrus bilaterally. Printed...

Speech signals are comprised of auditory objects that are localized in time, but can appear anywhere in the record. We introduce a strategy for non-recurrent irregular signal-driven sampling and subsequent maximum likelihood interpolation of speech subbands that achieves object constancy—the representation of an auditory object is precisely locked to the timing of its features, but is otherwise...

The encoding of temporal regularities is a critical property of the auditory system, as short-term neural representations of environmental statistics serve to auditory object formation and detection of potentially relevant novel stimuli. A putative neural mechanism underlying regularity encoding is repetition suppression, the reduction of neural activity to repeated stimulation. Although repeti...

Early visual to auditory substitution devices encode 2-D monocular images into sounds while more recent use distance information from 3-D sensors. This study assesses whether the addition of sound-encoded in systems helps convey “where” information. is important design new sensory devices. We conducted experiments for object localization and navigation tasks with a handheld audio system. It com...

For a lot of processing in the brain, two pathways are clearly better than one. In the visual system, two anatomically and functionally distinct pathways are thought to be specialized for processing information about where an object is versus what an object is. In a classic behavioral experiment1, dorsal lesions in posterior parietal cortex of monkeys resulted in worse performance only when the...