Recent research has demonstrated that humans are able to implicitly encode and retain repeating patterns in meaningless auditory noise. Our study aimed at testing the robustness of long-term implicit recognition memory for these learned patterns. Participants performed a cyclic/non-cyclic discrimination task, during which they were presented with either 1-s cyclic noises (CNs) (the two halves o...

In three experiments, we investigated whether the ease with which distracting sounds can be ignored depends on their distance from fixation and from attended visual events. In the first experiment, participants shadowed an auditory stream of words presented behind their heads, while simultaneously fixating visual lip-read information consistent with the relevant auditory stream, or meaningless ...

Conventional statistics-based methods for joint Chinese word segmentation and partof-speech tagging (S&T) have generalization ability to recognize new words that do not appear in the training data. An undesirable side effect is that a number of meaningless words will be incorrectly created. We propose an effective and efficient framework for S&T that introduces features to significantly reduce ...

Neuropsychological studies indicate that, after brain damage, the ability to imitate meaningful or meaningless actions can be selectively impaired. However, the neural bases supporting the imitation of these two types of action are still poorly understood. Using PET, we investigated in 10 healthy individuals the neural mechanisms of imitating novel, meaningless actions and familiar, meaningful ...

Previous studies have suggested that imitators can reproduce known gestures shown by a model using a semantic, indirect route, and novel gestures using a sublexical, direct route. In the present study we aimed at testing the validity of such a dual-route model of action imitation. Patients with either left-brain damage (LBD) or right-brain damage (RBD) were tested on an action imitation task. A...

This article analyzes Laxmi Prasad Devkota's Nepali poem "Shūnyamā Shūnyasarī" ("Being Empty in Emptiness") by using the insights of Vedanta that has a special focus on non-dual (Advaita) philosophy. The is devotional as well confessional, which common theme South Asian literature composed Bhakti ("devotional”) tradition. Devkota, last hour his life, realized he really went astray and could not...

Positive feedbacks reinforce goal-directed behavior and evoke pleasure. In Parkinson's disease (PD) the striatal dysfunction impairs motor performance, but also may lead to decreased positive feedback (reward) processing. This study investigates two types of positive feedback processing (monetary feedback and positive informative feedback), both compared to meaningless feedback, in PD patients ...

The ability to generate new meaning by rearranging combinations of meaningless sounds is a fundamental component of language. Although animal vocalizations often comprise combinations of meaningless acoustic elements, evidence that rearranging such combinations generates functionally distinct meaning is lacking. Here, we provide evidence for this basic ability in calls of the chestnut-crowned b...