BACKGROUND Several reports suggest beneficial impacts of either physical or mental activity on cognitive function in old age. However, the differential effects of complex mental and physical activities on cognitive performance in humans remain to be clarified. METHODS This randomized controlled trial evaluates a cognitive and a physical standardized 6-month activity intervention (3 x 1.5 h/wk...

Any statistical pattern recognition system includes a feature extraction component. For character patterns, several feature families have been tested, such as the Fourier-Wavelet Descriptors. We are proposing here a generalization of this family: the Fourier-Packet Descriptors. We have selected sets of these features and tested them on handwritten digits: the error rate was 1.55% with a polynom...

Support Vector Machines represent a new approach to pattern classification developed from the theory of Structural Risk Minimization[1]. In this paper, we present an investigation into the application of Support Vector Machines’ to the confidence measurement problem in speech recognition. Specifically, based on the results from an initial decoding of an utterance during speech recognition, we d...

In this paper, we describe our Question Answering System. We proposed to use 200 answer types to abate answer types’ ambiguity in Query Analysis. And as the score of extracting correct answers, we proposed TF・IDF and a word distance between an answer candidate and a weighty word from a query. Comparative experiments were conducted with QAC1 and QAC2 formal run test set. The result showed that 2...

Previous research has shown drug-free Ecstasy users to demonstrate selective cognitive impairment. However, there seems to be a degree of individual variation in the occurrence of such deficits. The present study aimed to assess whether these cognitive deficits are related to an awareness of problematic Ecstasy use, or to past drug dosage. Twenty regular Ecstasy users who reported experiencing ...

The discrimination tests were conducted at the word level to study the durational variability of vowel quantity boundary in perception, utilising disyllabic synthetic nonsense words. Four kinds of word structures and five kinds of pitch and intensity variance patterns were used. The number of the tests became 60. 21 Japanese, Finnish and Czech speakers participated in these tests as the subject...

Purpose The toddler years are a critical period for language development and growth. We investigated how event-related potentials (ERPs) to repeated and novel nonwords are associated with clinical assessments of language in young children. In addition, nonword repetition (NWR) was used to measure phonological working memory to determine the unique and collective contribution of ERP measures of ...

The minimal standard deviations achievable for concurrent estimates of thresholds and psychometric function slopes as well as the optimal target values for adaptive procedures were calculated as functions of stimulus levels and track length on the basis of the binomial theory. Two approaches to adaptive procedures that converge at the optimal target values were introduced and tested with Monte–...

In order to gain insight into the combined effects of talker, item, and listener related factors, we examined word recognition in two “special populations” using stimuli that were well controlled in terms of inherent lexical difficulty. Experiment 1 investigated recognition of English words by non-native listeners under conditions known to affect native listener word recognition. Experiment 2 i...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS Vestibular nerve section and transtympanic gentamicin administration are procedures with proven efficacy in the treatment of vertigo associated with Meniere's disease refractory to medical management. Hearing loss is a known complication of each of these procedures; however, there has not been a report of hearing results of both treatments from a single institution. STUD...