Sensory substitution constitutes an interesting domain of study to consider the philosopher's classical question of distal attribution: how we can distinguish between a sensation and the perception of an object that causes this sensation. We tested the hypothesis that distal attribution consists of three distinct components: an object, a perceptual space, and a coupling between subjects' moveme...

Spontaneous motor tempo and rhythmical synchronisation were studied in 21⁄2to 4-year-old children. Children were tested in three sessions, each of which included three consecutive tasks: first, spontaneous manual tapping tempo, second, synchronisation to external tempo, followed by spontaneous manual tapping tempo again. Results showed that regular spontaneous manual tapping tempo could be obse...

Typically, serial recall performance can be disrupted by the presence of an irrelevant stream of background auditory stimulation, but only if the background stream changes over time (the auditory changing-state effect). It was hypothesized that segmentation of the auditory stream is necessary for changing state to be signified. In Experiment 1, continuous random pitch glides failed to disrupt s...

Two recent patients in our behavioral series investigating the psychological effects of callosal section exhibit right hemisphere language. Using lateralized visual and auditory stimulation, semantic, phonetic, and expressive linguistic functions were examined. While the right hemisphere language systems in both patients were shown to be capable of semantic information processing, they differed...

Asynchronous bimodal stimulation during prenatal development elicits higher levels of behavioral and physiological arousal in precocial avian embryos than does unimodal sensory stimulation. To investigate whether the increased arousal associated with prenatal bimodal stimulation has enduring effects into postnatal development, bobwhite quail (Colinus virginianus) embryos received no supplementa...

Heart rate responses of 84 near-term fetuses to recorded female voices were examined in 166 trials of auditory stimulation. Each fetus was presented with a 2-min recording of their mother's voice and a 2-min recording of a female stranger's voice, in counterbalanced order, with a 10-min rest period between trials. High frequency heart rate variability during a 2-min baseline period was used to ...

Nervous systems may encode information about sensory stimuli using the temporal relations in spiking patterns between neurons. By conducting simultaneous intracellular recordings on pairs of auditory neurons we measured the strength of correlations between elements of the first three processing levels in the metathoracic auditory network of the locust. We quantified the degree of spike synchron...

The analysis of hearing mechanisms and research on the influence of various internal (pathologies, ageing) and external (trauma, vibration, noise) factors on sound perception are usually done using acoustic waves induced in the external ear canal. Stimuli which have been used for this purpose are: clicks, tone bursts, half-sine-waves, single tones or pairs of tones. The Corti organ’s responses ...

Ten-day-old chicks were continuously exposed to pure tones (500, I 500, or 3000 Hz) at 125 dB SPL for 12 hours and sacrificed 10 days after exposure. The basilar papillae were embedded in plastic, sectioned and hair cells were counted at ~OO-!Lm intervals throughout the length of the papilla. The position of hair cell loss along the basilar membrane varied systematically as a log-linear functio...

The purpose of this experiment was to study the effects of stimulus level on discrimination of frequency as represented in the temporal waveforms of acoustic and electrical signals. The subjects were four nonhuman primates in which one ear had been deafened and implanted with an electrode array and the other ear was untreated. Frequency difference limens for 100 Hz electrical sinusoidal stimula...