________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Masked semantic priming in cocktail party situation The present study aimed at testing automatic semantic processing in the auditory modality using the cocktail party situation. Participants had to perform a lexical decision task on a target item embedded in a multi-talker babble. This babbl...

We examined whether the type of response used to report items recalled from short-term memory affects the age difference in verbal and spatial memory spans. Younger and older adults viewed either a series of letters or a series of locations in a grid, and then they reported their memory for the items either vocally or by using a touch screen. Overall, age differences were larger for spatial mem...

This research involves perceptual comparisons with cues that vary in one of four ways (picture, sound, spoken word or printed word) and with targets that are either pictures or environmental sounds. Students were required to match cue-target pairs and determine whether the 2 successive events represented features drawn from the same item. Both the perceptual/linguistic format and the modality o...

When monitoring a rapid serial visual presentation at 100 ms per item for 2 targets among distractors, viewers have difficulty reporting the 2nd target (T2) when it appears 200-500 ms after the onset of the 1st letter target (T1): an attentional blink (AB; M. M. Chun & M. C. Potter, 1995b; J. E. Raymond, K. L. Shapiro, & K. M. Arnell, 1992). Does the same deficit occur with auditory search? The...

Two experiments evaluated the hypothesis that perceptual fluency is used to infer prior occurrence. Subjects heard (Experiment 1) or saw (Experiment 2) a list of words and then were presented in the same modality with both these and other words twice in succession: first in a more or less impoverished fashion, and then in clear fashion. For the first of these two presentations, the subjects tri...

This study was designed to develop and test an auditory event-related potential (ERP) based spelling system for a brain-computer interface (BCI) and to compare user's performance between the auditory and visual modality. The spelling system, where letters in a matrix were coded with acoustically presented numbers, was tested on a group of healthy volunteers. The results were compared with a vis...

In three experiments, we examined the separate cognitive demands of processing and storage in working memory and looked at how effective the coordination was when items for storage varied in format/modality. A sentence verification task involving arithmetic facts was combined with a span task involving two to six items presented in picture, printed word, or spoken word format. The first two exp...

In this paper we present a visual interactive interface to create focused summaries of human conversations via mapping to the concepts within an ontology. The ontology includes nodes for the conversation participants, for Dialog Act (DA) properties such as decision, action-item or subjectivity, as well as for entities mentioned in the conversation. The classifiers used to annotate conversation ...