Current models of attention, typically claim that vision and audition are limited by a common attentional resource which means that visual performance should be adversely affected by a concurrent auditory task and vice versa. Here, we test this implication by measuring auditory (pitch) and visual (contrast) thresholds in conjunction with cross-modal secondary tasks and find that no such interfe...

feeling secure is a prerequisite of any social, economic, cultural and political development and it is directly related to the level of development of the society. being aware of the situation of security feelings of society members plays a key role in recognizing the challenges and development strategies of society and can strengthen the infrastructures of the society. the present study aims t...

OBJECTIVE The Heidelberg Phoneme Discrimination Test (HLAD), developed and standardized in 1998, is widely used in the differential diagnosis of dyslexia. Normative data have only been available for children of the 2nd and 4th grades, while norms for the 3rd grade are still missing. PATIENTS AND METHODS We assessed three HLAD subtests [auditory phoneme discrimination, kinesthetic phoneme disc...

This study compares the efficiency and plausibility of published computational models of familiarity discrimination in the perirhinal cortex. Substantial evidence indicates that the perirhinal cortex is involved in both the familiarity discrimination aspect of recognition memory and in perceptual functions involved with representations of complete stimuli (i.e., object identification). Publishe...

Discrimination of the direction of motion of a noisy stimulus is an example of sensory discrimination under uncertainty. For stimuli that are extended in time, reaction time is quicker for larger signal values (e.g., discrimination of opposite directions of motion compared with neighboring orientations) and larger signal strength (e.g., stimuli with higher contrast or motion coherence, that is,...

Musical experiences and native language are both known to affect auditory processing. The present work aims to disentangle the influences of native language phonology and musicality on behavioral and subcortical sound feature processing in a population of musically diverse Finnish speakers as well as to investigate the specificity of enhancement from musical training. Finnish speakers are highl...

Birds have excellent spatial acuity and colour vision compared to other vertebrates while spatial contrast sensitivity is relatively poor for unknown reasons. Contrast sensitivity describes the detection of gratings of varying spatial frequency. It is unclear whether bird brightness discrimination between large uniform fields is poor as well. Here we show that budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulat...

Underwater, the contrast between object and background is much larger reduced with increasing distance between object and observer than in air. For marine predators, such as pinnipeds, it would therefore be advantageous to possess a high sensitivity for brightness differences, since this would increase the distance at which prey can be detected visually. Few studies have examined the brightness...

PURPOSE To evaluate the factors, including personality and coping styles, likely to be influential in enhancing the social stigma of epilepsy. METHODS Data were collected from 400 adults with epilepsy recruited from 10 epilepsy centers in Korea. Clinical information about seizures was obtained by neurologists, and other information was collected from self-completed questionnaires, including t...

In the uncanny valley phenomenon, the causes of the feeling of uncanniness as well as the impact of the uncanniness on behavioral performances still remain open. The present study investigated the behavioral effects of stimulus uncanniness, particularly with respect to speeded response. Pictures of fish were used as visual stimuli. Participants engaged in direction discrimination, spatial cuein...