This study demonstrated effects of age, education, and sex on complex reaction time in a large national sample (N = 3,616) with a wide range in age (32-85) and education. Participants completed speeded auditory tasks (from the MIDUS [Midlife in the U.S.] Stop and Go Switch Task) by telephone. Complexity ranged from a simple repeated task to an…

Two-day-old chicks were found to prefer an ancestral maternal call over a brief repetitive pure tone burst when stationary models emitted the calls; however, other chicks prefered the repetitive tone over the maternal call when the models emitting the calls were moving. (JMB)

Recorded the pattern of crying in neonates who were responding to natural infant cries, synthetic cries, and silence. (GO)

Investigates the effect of target size and presence, intensity, and location of sound on the visual following of infants one and two months of age. (Author/RH)

A go/no-go conditioned head-turn paradigm was used to examine the abilities of 6- and 12-month-olds to discriminate changes in temporal grouping and their perception of absolute and relative timing information when listening to patterns of white-noise bursts. (Author/RH)

Using signal detectability theory, analysis was performed on auditory frequency sensitivity data obtained by Hutt et al, 1968, on human neonates. Reanalysis using 12 male infants confirms superiority of lower frequencies and square waves in provoking startles in neonates. No state of arousal effects were found on sensitivity. (JH)

Results from one experiment indicated that the temporal pattern and spectral complexity of moderately intense auditory stimuli influenced cardiac responses in 24 alert newborns. A second study extended the temporal-pattern effect to other vowel stimuli in a no-delay discrimination paradigm. (Author/RH)

An adaptive up/down tracking procedure was used in combination with a visually reinforced head-turn response to examine infants' (6 to 18 months of age) auditory sensitivity for 500-, 2000-, and 8000-Hz tone bursts. Six-month-olds were significantly less sensitive to the 8000-Hz tone than to either lower frequency; older infants demonstrated…

To test whether six-month-old infants recognize the auditory similarity of speech sounds sharing a value on a phonetic-feature dimension, an operant head turn procedure was used. Results indicated that the performance of infants trained on phonetically related speech sounds was far superior to that of infants in the nonphonetic control group.…

Two experiments used a visual habituation paradigm to examine infants' categorical discrimination of the medial stop consonants /aba/ and /apa/. Results provided evidence of infant categorical discrimination based solely on closure duration. Infants shifted their boundary toward shorter closure durations if they received pulsing during…

Findings demonstrate a finer partitioning of auditory space near midline than in hemifields. Discusses implications for an understanding of the development of auditory processing mechanisms in sound localizations. (RH)

It is commonly observed that "tone deaf" individuals are unable to hear the beat of a tune, yet deficits on simple timing tests have not been found. In this study, we investigated rhythm processing in nine individuals with congenital amusia ("tone deafness") and nine controls. Participants were presented with pairs of 5-note sequences, and were…