Pitch perception is fundamental to melody in music and prosody in speech. Unlike many animals, the vast majority of human adults store melodic information primarily in terms of relative not absolute pitch, and readily recognize a melody whether rendered in a high or a low pitch range. We show that at 6 months infants are also primarily relative…

Real-time spectrographic displays (SDs) have been used in speech training for more than 30 years with adults and children who have severe and profound hearing impairments. Despite positive outcomes from treatment studies, concerns remain that the complex and abstract nature of spectrograms may make these speech training aids unsuitable for use…

A fly is buzzing around in the kitchen. You sneak up on it with a flyswatter, but just as you get close to it, it flies away. What makes flies and other insects so good at escaping from danger? The fact that insects have eyesight that can easily detect moving objects is one of the things that help them survive. In this month's Science Shorts,…

Three experiments investigated whether retrieval of information about different dimensions of a visual object varies as a function of the perceptual properties of those dimensions. The experiments involved two perception-based matching tasks and two retrieval-based matching tasks. A signal-to-respond methodology was used in all tasks. A stochastic…

Within music heard, there are two distinguishable factors. The first is the relation of the music to its seeming emotionality-the relation, for example, of the wedding march to its joyfulness. The second is that seeming emotionality itself-the sorrowfulness, for example, of the second movement of the Chopin Sonata. The author looks for an answer…

Images with narrative intent are ideally suited for beginning art viewers. As cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen has discovered in her research on aesthetic development, viewers at this stage-children and adults alike-look for stories in art, even when the artist did not intend them. In this first "Aesthetic Stage" viewers are considered…

The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to determine the extent to which 4-channel, slow-acting wide dynamic range amplitude compression (WDRC) can counteract the perceptual effects of reduced auditory dynamic range and (b) to examine the relation between objective measures of speech intelligibility and categorical ratings of speech quality for…

The relative efficacy with which appearance of a new object orients visual attention was investigated. At issue is whether the visual system treats onset as being of particular importance or only 1 of a number of stimulus events equally likely to summon attention. Using the 1-shot change detection paradigm, the authors compared detectability of…

A flashed stimulus is perceived as spatially lagging behind a moving stimulus when they are spatially aligned. When several elements are perceptually grouped into a unitary moving object, a flash presented at the leading edge of the moving stimulus suffers a larger spatial lag than a flash presented at the trailing edge (K. Watanabe. R. Nijhawan.…

A sound presented in close temporal proximity to a visual stimulus can alter the perceived temporal dimensions of the visual stimulus (temporal ventriloquism). In this article, the authors demonstrate temporal ventriloquism in the flash-lag effect (FLE), a visual illusion in which a flash appears to lag relative to a moving object. In Experiment…

The phenomenon of attentional capture by a unique yet irrelevant singleton distractor has typically been studied in visual search. In this article, the authors examine whether a similar phenomenon occurs in the auditory domain. Participants searched sequences of sounds for targets defined by frequency, intensity, or duration. The presence of a…

Two partly overlapping frequency glides can be perceived as consisting of a long pitch trajectory accompanied by a short tone in the temporal middle. It was found that the appearance of this middle tone could not be related to peripheral processes concerned with spectral splatter or combination tones that could have emerged during the overlap of…

A pattern-masked arrow negatively biased the "free choice" between 2 manual responses or between 2 vocal responses. This apparently nonconscious influence occurred only when the free-choice trials were intermixed randomly with other trials that terminated in fully visible arrows, which directed a response of the same modality (manual vs. vocal) as…

Human observers demonstrate impressive visual sensitivity to human movement. What defines this sensitivity? If motor experience influences the visual analysis of action, then observers should be most sensitive to their own movements. If view-dependent visual experience determines visual sensitivity to human movement, then observers should be most…

The phonological store construct of the working memory model is critically evaluated. Three experiments test the prediction that the effect of irrelevant sound and the effect of phonological similarity each survive the action of articulatory suppression but only when presentation of to-be-remembered lists is auditory, not visual. No evidence was…