Data on orienting and habituation to irrelevant sound can distinguish between task-specific and general accounts of auditory distraction: Distractors either disrupt specific cognitive processes (e.g., Jones, 1993; Salamé & Baddeley, 1982), or remove more general-purpose attentional resources from any attention-demanding task (e.g., Cowan,…

Inclusion of male and female subjects in behavioral neuroscience research requires a concerted effort to characterize sex differences in standardized behavioral assays. Sex differences in hippocampus-dependent assays have been widely reported but are still poorly characterized. In the present study, we conducted a parametric analysis of…

Autism is strongly associated with sensory processing difficulties. We investigate sensory habituation, given its relevance for understanding important phenotypic traits like hyper- and hypo-sensitivities. We collected electroencephalography data from 22 neuro-typical(NT) and 13 autistic(ASD) children during the presentation of visual and auditory…

Passive testing of auditory function is an important objective in individuals with ASD due to known difficulties in understanding and/or following task instructions. In present study the habituation to standard tones following deviants and the auditory discriminative processes were examined in two conditions: electronic and human sounds, in a…

Auditory processing abnormalities in fragile X syndrome (FXS) may contribute to difficulties with language development, pattern identification, and contextual updating. Participants with FXS (N = 41) and controls (N = 27) underwent auditory event-related potentials during presentation of an oddball paradigm. Data was adequate for analysis for 33…

It is estimated that nearly 90% of children on the autism spectrum exhibit sensory atypicalities. What aspects of sensory processing are affected in autism? Although sensory processing can be studied along multiple dimensions, two of the most basic ones involve examining instantaneous sensory responses and how the responses change over time. These…

Auditory sensitivities are common among people with autism spectrum disorder diagnoses (ASD). As underlying factors are unknown, we examined whether ASD adults (N[subscript ASD] = 33; N[subscript Typically Developing] = 31; 25-45 years; IQ > 70): (1) habituated slower to auditory stimuli; (2) had lower auditory detection thresholds; and (3)…

Our aim was to investigate perceptual attunement (PA) in vowel perception of Dutch-learning infants (6-8-10-month-olds) using the hybrid visual fixation paradigm (Houston et al., 2007). Infants were habituated to one phoneme and subsequently tested on items in which a token of the habituated phoneme alternated with either another token of the same…

The development of attention to dynamic faces versus objects providing synchronous audiovisual versus silent visual stimulation was assessed in a large sample of infants. Maintaining attention to the faces and voices of people speaking is critical for perceptual, cognitive, social, and language development. However, no studies have systematically…

In this study, we investigated neural precursors of language acquisition as potential endophenotypes of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in 3-month-old infants at high and low familial ASD risk. Infants were imaged using functional near-infrared spectroscopy while they listened to auditory stimuli containing syllable repetitions; their neural…

Recent work has demonstrated that the addition of multiple talkers during habituation improves 14-month-olds' performance in the switch task (Rost & McMurray, 2009). While the authors suggest that this boost in performance is due to the increase in acoustic variability (Rost & McMurray, 2010), it is also possible that there is…

Lesion and inactivation studies indicate that the central amygdala (CeA) participates in the expression of cued and contextual fear, whereas the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) is only involved in the latter. The basis for this functional dissociation is unclear because CeA and BNST form similar connections with the amygdala and…

Auditory hyper-reactivity is a common sensory-perceptual abnormality in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), which interrupts behavioral adaptation. We investigated acoustic startle response (ASR) modulations in 17 children with ASD and 27 with typical development (TD). Compared to TD, children with ASD had larger ASR magnitude to weak stimuli and…

Habituation--the most basic form of learning--is used to evaluate central nervous system (CNS) maturation and to detect abnormalities in fetal brain development. In the current study, habituation, stimulus specificity and dishabituation of auditory evoked responses were measured in fetuses and newborns using fetal magnetoencephalography (fMEG). An…

Early in life, infants possess an effective face-processing system which becomes specialized according to the faces present in the environment. Infants are also exposed to the voices and sounds of caregivers. Previous studies have found that face-voice associations become progressively more tuned to the types of association most prevalent in the…