This study investigated multisensory interactions in the perception of auditory and visual motion. When auditory and visual apparent motion streams are presented concurrently in opposite directions, participants often fail to discriminate the direction of motion of the auditory stream, whereas perception of the visual stream is unaffected by the…

In order to enable students who are blind and visually impaired to observe chemical changes in solutions, a hand-held device was designed to output light intensity as an audible tone. The submersible audible light sensor (SALS) creates an audio signal by which one can observe reactions in a solution in real time, using standard laboratory…

Humans find some sounds more pleasing than others; such preferences may underlie our enjoyment of music. To gain insight into the evolutionary origins of these preferences, we explored whether they are present in other animals. We designed a novel method to measure the spontaneous sound preferences of cotton-top tamarins, a species that has been…

For 25 years now, there has been a serious attempt to get at the fundamental cause(s) of dyslexia in our laboratory. A great deal of research has been carried out on the psychological and brain underpinnings of the linguistic dysfunctions seen in dyslexia, but attempts to get at its cause have been limited. Initially, observations were made on the…

In a series of experiments, the effect of white noise distortion and talker variation on lexical access in normal and Broca's aphasic participants was examined using an auditory lexical decision paradigm. Masking the prime stimulus in white noise resulted in reduced semantic priming for both groups, indicating that lexical access is degraded by…

Most research on object individuation in infants has focused on the visual domain. Yet the problem of object individuation is not unique to the visual system, but shared by other sensory modalities. This research examined 4.5-month-old infants' capacity to use auditory information to individuate objects. Infants were presented with events in which…

Education administrators make buying decisions for furniture based on many factors. Cost, durability, functionality, safety and aesthetics represent just a few. Those issues always will be important, but gaining greater recognition in recent years has been the role furniture plays in creating positive, high-performance learning environments. The…

A sound presented in temporal proximity to a light can alter the perceived temporal occurrence of that light (temporal ventriloquism). The authors explored whether spatial discordance between the sound and light affects this phenomenon. Participants made temporal order judgments about which of 2 lights appeared first, while they heard sounds…

Listeners with sensorineural hearing loss have well-documented elevated hearing thresholds; reduced auditory dynamic ranges; and reduced spectral (or frequency) resolution that may reduce speech intelligibility, especially in the presence of competing sounds. Amplification and amplitude compression partially compensate for elevated thresholds and…

In this paper, we argue that music cognition involves the use of acoustic and auditory codes to evoke a variety of conscious experiences. The variety of domains that are encompassed by music is so diverse that it is unclear whether a single domain of structure or experience is defining. Music is best understood as a form of communication in which…

This paper reports on a literature review conducted in the UK for the Design Council and CfBT (Higgins et al., 2005) which looked at the evidence of the impact of environments on learning in schools. We have reviewed the available evidence regarding different facets of the physical environment and provided an analysis based on different areas of…

The study investigated the effects of music with high arousal potential and negative affect (HA), music with low arousal potential and positive affect (LA), and everyday noise, on the cognitive task performance of introverts and extraverts. Forty participants completed five cognitive tasks: immediate recall, free recall, numerical and delayed…

The physics of sound is often studied in introductory physics class experiments involving a tube of resonating air. In typical setups, pistons control the length of a cylindrical space or a microphone is moved within a tube. While these activities are useful and can be made very quantitative, they don't directly demonstrate the sounds that are…

This paper investigates the nature of the substitutions used for the dental fricatives (/theta/ and /eth/) by Dutch learners of English as a second language. By means of an OT analysis, the underlying reasons for the difficulties encountered with these sounds are brought to light. The present data reveal that phonetics (or acoustics) rather than…

This study determined the effects of sound-field amplification (SFA) on the speed with which students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) followed teacher directions. A multiple baseline design was used with 3 elementary-aged students with ADHD to assess the effects of SFA across 4 types of directions: (a) task demand (e.g., get…