In natural environments, a sound can be heard as stable despite the presence of other occasionally louder sounds. For example, when a portion in a voice is replaced by masking noise, the interrupted voice may still appear illusorily continuous. Previous research found that continuity illusions of simple interrupted sounds, such as tones, are accompanied by weaker activity in the primary auditor...

Research has produced conflicting evidence regarding whether performance of an on-going visual task is disrupted more by interruption from a or auditory alert. Tasks and alerts studied to date have been complex idiosyncratic. This experiment examined how the modality simple alerts—visual icons tones—affected task. Participants (58 females 4 males) tracked target while performing choice reaction...

Phonemic restoration, or top-down repair of speech, is the ability of the brain to perceptually reconstruct missing speech sounds, using remaining speech features, linguistic knowledge and context. This usually occurs in conditions where the interrupted speech is perceived as continuous. The main goal of this study was to investigate whether voice continuity was necessary for phonemic restorati...

[1] We measure direction and amplitude of ocean-generated continuous seismic noise in the western United States. Slowness direction of the noise is determined using array beamforming, and particle motion direction from individual three-component stations. We find two surprising results. First, the noise is highly monodirectional at all sites, regardless of coastal distance. A single narrow gene...

Evaluating quality improvement interventions requires a variety of methods. These range from quantitative methods, such as randomised controlled trials, to quasi-experimental (controlled before-and-after and interrupted time series) and uncontrolled before-and-after studies, including clinical audits, to determine whether improvement interventions have had an effect. Qualitative methods are oft...

BACKGROUND In uncontrolled before-after studies, CONSORT was shown to improve the reporting of randomised trials. Before-after studies ignore underlying secular trends and may overestimate the impact of interventions. Our aim was to assess the impact of the 2007 STROBE statement publication on the quality of observational study reporting, using both uncontrolled before-after analyses and interr...