We present evidence that experience and cholinergic modulation in an early sensory network interact to improve certainty about olfactory stimuli. The data we present are in agreement with existing theoretical ideas about the functional role of acetylcholine but highlight the importance of early sensory networks in addition to cortical networks. We…

The spatial-temporal association indicates that time is represented spatially along a left-to-right line. It is unclear whether the spatial-temporal association is mainly related to a perceptual or a motor component. In addition, the spatial-temporal association is not consistently found using a time reproduction task. Our rationale for this…

Purpose: This study examined whether the perceived taste intensity of liquids with chemesthetic properties influenced lingua-palatal pressures and submental surface electromyography (sEMG) in swallowing, compared with water. Method: Swallowing was studied in 80 healthy women, stratified by age group and genetic taste status. General Labeled…

Integrating the multisensory features of talking faces is critical to learning and extracting coherent meaning from social signals. While we know much about the development of these capacities at the behavioral level, we know very little about the underlying neural processes. One prominent behavioral milestone of these capacities is the perceptual…

Category training can induce category effects, whereby color discrimination of stimuli spanning a newly learned category boundary is enhanced relative to equivalently spaced stimuli from within the newly learned category (e.g., categorical perception). However, the underlying mechanisms of these acquired category effects are not fully understood.…

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are often associated with aberrant responses to sensory stimuli, which are thought to contribute to the social, communication, and repetitive behavior deficits that define ASD. However, there are few studies that separate aberrant sensory responses by individual sensory modality to assess modality-specific…

How much of infant behaviour can be accounted for by signal-level analyses of stimuli? The current paper directly compares the moment-by-moment behaviour of 8-month-old infants in an audiovisual preferential looking task with that of several computational models that use the same video stimuli as presented to the infants. One type of model…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of orchestration on musicians' and nonmusicians' (N = 40) perception of musical tension. Participants were asked to register their perceptions of tension using the Continuous Response Digital Interface dial while listening to three orchestrations (full orchestra, brass quintet, and solo piano)…

Tactile memory systems are involved in the storage and retrieval of information about stimuli that impinge on the body surface and objects that people explore haptically. Here, the authors review the behavioral, neuropsychological, neurophysiological, and neuroimaging research on tactile memory. This body of research reveals that tactile memory…

A linked perceptual class consists of two distinct perceptual classes, A' and B', the members of which have become related to each other. For example, a linked perceptual class might be composed of many pictures of a woman (one perceptual class) and the sounds of that woman's voice (the other perceptual class). In this case, any sound of the…

Background: Nasometry has supplemented perceptual assessments of nasality, using speech stimuli, which are devoid of nasal consonants. However, such speech stimuli are not representative of conversational speech. A weak relationship has been found in previous studies between perceptual ratings of hypernasality and nasalance scores for passages…

This research focuses on the relation between color and psychological functioning, specifically, that between red and performance attainment. Red is hypothesized to impair performance on achievement tasks, because red is associated with the danger of failure in achievement contexts and evokes avoidance motivation. Four experiments demonstrate that…

Although the veridicality of unconscious perception is increasingly accepted, core issues remain unresolved [Jack, A., & Shallice, T. (2001). Introspective physicalism as an approach to the science of consciousness. "Cognition, 79," 161-196], and sharp disagreement persists regarding fundamental methodological and theoretical issues. The most…

The question regarding visual imagery and visual perception remain an open issue. Many studies have tried to understand if the two processes share the same mechanisms or if they are independent, using different neural substrates. Most research has been directed towards the need of activation of primary visual areas during imagery. Here we review…

The research reported here was designed to measure the abilities of school-age children to form and generalize "visual concepts" on the basis of their observation of prepared sets of art reproductions. The art reproduction sets displayed similarities based upon various visual attributes. Discrimination of the attributes common to any…