Six experiments investigated infants' sensitivity to numerosity in auditory sequences. In prior studies (Lipton & Spelke, 2003), 6-month-old infants discriminated sequences of 8 versus 16 but not 8 versus 12 sounds, and 9-month-old infants discriminated 8 versus 12 but not 8 versus 10 sounds, when the continuous variables of rate, sound duration,…

In earlier studies with rats, the effectiveness of the auditory element of a tone--light discriminative stimulus was enhanced when the conditioned incentive value of the compound was negative rather than positive. The present experiment systematically replicated these results in pigeons trained to press a treadle in the presence of a tone--light…

This study is an investigation of what musicians consider to be their aesthetic experience with jazz music selections that vary in level of conceptual advancement (melodic complexity during improvised solos). Music major participants (N = 128) were assigned to either the jazz musician (n = 64) or nonjazz musician (n = 64) group. Data were gathered…

Purpose: Some researchers have assessed ear-specific performance of auditory processing ability using speech recognition tasks with normative data based on diotic administration. The present study investigated whether monotic and diotic administrations yield similar results using the Selective Auditory Attention Test. Method: Seventy-two typically…

In this study we examined conceptual priming using environmental sounds and visually displayed words. Priming for sounds and words was observed in response latency as well as in event-related potentials. Reactions were faster when a related word followed an environmental sound and vice versa. Moreover both stimulus types produced an N400-effect…

Previous reports have demonstrated that the comprehension of sentences describing motion in a particular direction (toward, away, up, or down) is affected by concurrently viewing a stimulus that depicts motion in the same or opposite direction. We report 3 experiments that extend our understanding of the relation between perception and language…

Resistance to interference from irrelevant auditory stimuli undergoes development throughout childhood. To test whether semantic processes account for age-related changes in a Stroop-like picture-word interference effect, children (3-to 12-year-olds) and adults named pictures while listening to words varying in terms of semantic relatedness to the…

A novel effect is reported in which serial recall of visual digits was disrupted to a greater degree by the presence of the same set of digits presented as an irrelevant auditory sequence than by the presence of irrelevant auditory consonants, but only when the order of the irrelevant digits was incongruent with that of the to-be-remembered digits…

Two experiments used both irrelevant speech and tones in order to assess the effect of manipulating the spatial location of irrelevant sound. Previous research in this area had produced inconclusive results (e.g., Colle, 1980). The current study demonstrated a novel finding, that sound presented to the left ear produces the greatest level of…

Following up on an earlier positron emission tomography (PET) experiment (Indefrey et al., 2001), we used a scene description paradigm to investigate whether a posterior inferior frontal region subserving syntactic encoding for speaking is also involved in syntactic parsing during listening. In the language production part of the experiment,…

Visual speech cues presented in synchrony with discrepant auditory speech cues are usually combined to a surprisingly clear unitary percept that corresponds with neither of the two sensory inputs (the McGurk illusion). This audiovisual integration process is commonly believed to be highly autonomous and robust to cognitive intervention, unlike the…

The existence of a rostrocaudal gradient of medial temporal lobe (MTL) activation during memory encoding has historically received support from positron emission tomography studies, but less so from functional MRI (FMRI) studies. More recently, FMRI studies have demonstrated that characteristics of the stimuli can affect the location of activation…

Through the preferential pairing of response positions to pitch, here we show that the internal representation of pitch height is spatial in nature and affects performance, especially in musically trained participants, when response alternatives are either vertically or horizontally aligned. The finding that our cognitive system maps pitch height…

This study sought to investigate whether the abnormally small P3 amplitudes observed in pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) are related to differences in processing capacity. PDD children and adolescents and their control groups participated in the study. Visual probe stimuli were presented during an auditory task with two levels of difficulty.…

Some studies of the event-related potentials demonstrated a reduction of the voluntary component P3 (P300 or P3b) in youngsters with the attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or in conduct disorders (CD), and a reduction of the automatic processing component, mismatch negativity, in patients with both ADHD and CD (ADHD+CD). Recently, a…