Thresholds in various visual and auditory perception tasks have been found to improve markedly with practice at intermediate levels of task difficulty. Recently, however, there have been reports that training with identical stimuli, which, by definition, were impossible to discriminate correctly beyond chance, could induce as much discrimination learning as could training with different stimuli...

Groups of 4-day-old neonates were tested for dichotic discrimination and ear differences with the High-Amplitude-Sucking procedure. In the first experiment, dichotic speech discrimination was attested by comparison with a control group. Furthermore, among those subjects who showed a substantial recovery of sucking response at least after one of the two syllable changes, it was observed that sig...

Three experiments explored whether access to wheel running is sufficient as reinforcement to establish and maintain simple and conditional visual discriminations in nondeprived rats. In Experiment 1, 2 rats learned to press a lit key to produce access to running; responding was virtually absent when the key was dark, but latencies to respond were longer than for customary food and water reinfor...

In this paper we explore the probability that employees have employer-based health insurance. Health insurance is a fixed cost which when added to cash compensation raises the cost of a low-wage worker more than that of a non-low-wage worker. A worker who has high expected medical expenditures or whose family has such expenditures may raise the cost of health insurance for all workers in the fi...

Absolute pitch (AP), the rare ability to identify a musical pitch, occurs at a higher rate among East Asian musicians. This has stimulated considerable research on the comparative contributions of genetic and environmental factors. Two studies examined whether a similar ethnicity effect is found for relative pitch (RP), identifying the distance or interval between two tones. Nonmusicians (n = 1...

The extent to which target predictability and precueing affect express saccade generation was determined in Rhesus monkeys. Target predictability, as manipulated by the probability with which targets appeared at various locations, had a strong influence on express saccade generation. Pre-cueing the location of the appearance of an impending single target with an identical stimulus was effective...

Parental investment (involving time or money invested in 3-year-olds) and child health were assessed as an outcome of (a) children's risk status (preterm vs. full-term birth) and (b) maternal resources (defined here in terms of their problem-solving skills in resolving caregiving challenges). Resources were varied systematically as a function of maternal participation in a traditional home visi...

It was found out that allophones of vowel phonemes /i/ and /e/, surrounded by palatalized consonants, differed significantly in their duration, though their openness – the major articulator correlate of inherent vowel duration (IVD) – was practically the same. It is hypothesized that duration contrast between [i] and [e] is controlled by speakers of Russian to set off the lack of spectral disti...

The animal kingdom contains species with a wide variety of sensory systems that have been selected to function in different environmental niches, but that are also subject to modification by experience during an organism's lifetime. The modification of such systems by experience is often called perceptual learning. In rodents, the classic example of perceptual learning is the observation that s...

hyperspectral sensors provide a large number of spectral bands. this massive and complex data structure of hyperspectral images presents a challenge to traditional data processing techniques. therefore, reducing the dimensionality of hyperspectral images without losing important information is a very important issue for the remote sensing community. we propose to use overlap-based feature weigh...