Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the effect of chronic tinnitus on measures of listening effort and cognitive performance, as well as the relation between cognitive performance and the amount of listening effort obtained by those measures. Method: Thirteen normal-hearing young adults with chronic tinnitus were matched with a control group.…

Although hearing often declines with age, prior research has shown that older adults may benefit from multisensory input to a greater extent when compared to younger adults, a concept known as inverse effectiveness. While there is behavioral evidence in support of this phenomenon, less is known about its neural basis. The present functional MRI…

Background: Temporal information processing (TIP) underlies many aspects of cognitive functions like language, motor control, learning, memory, attention, etc. Millisecond timing may be assessed by sequencing abilities, e.g. the perception of event order. It may be measured with auditory temporal-order-threshold (TOT), i.e. a minimum time gap…

Load theory predicts that concurrent cognitive load impairs selective attention. For visual stimuli, it has been shown that this impairment can be selective: Distraction was specifically increased when the stimulus material used in the cognitive load task matches that of the selective attention task. Here, we report four experiments that…

The effect of cognitive load (CL) on speech recognition has received little attention despite the prevalence of CL in everyday life, e.g., dual-tasking. To assess the effect of CL on the interaction between lexically-mediated and acoustically-mediated processes, we measured the magnitude of the "Ganong effect" (i.e., lexical bias on phoneme…

Often, the sound arriving at the ears is a mixture from many different sources, but only 1 is of interest. To assist with selection, the auditory system structures the incoming input into streams, each of which ideally corresponds to a single source. Some authors have argued that this process of streaming is automatic and invariant, but recent…

Research by Posner and Mitchell (1967) was used to investigate levels of noise processing in testing subjects' ability to "gate out" the processing of irrelevant and unwanted material. Three experiments are reported in which subjects had to judge whether two letters were the "same" or "different". Noise elements were included to test attention…

This study compared children with either attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (n=24), reading disability (RD) (n=33), both (n=9), or controls. Children with ADHD were characterized by difficulty with a visual search task whereas children with RD had difficulty with an auditory processing task. Specifically, children with ADHD…

The study investigated two neurophysiologic components of event-related brain potential during auditory and visual target detection tasks with 11 non-retarded autistic children, 9 retarded autistic children, and 16 normal subjects, aged 15-19. Results were consistent with the hypothesis that non-retarded autism involves abnormal attentional and…