Purpose: The objectives of this study were to determine (a) whether school-age children with typical hearing demonstrate poorer auditory working memory performance in multitalker babble at degraded signal-to-noise ratios than in quiet; and (b) whether the amount of cognitive demand of the task contributed to differences in performance in noise. It…

This study is focused on identifying and describing the reasoning patterns of middle grade students when examining potentially similar figures. Described here is a framework that includes 11 strategies that students used during clinical interview to differentiate similar and non-similar figures. Two factors were found to influence the strategies…

College students are stressed. This is not news. However, the increasing level of stress and anxiety they report is alarming. Added to the traditional pressures to fit in, succeed, and mature, today's undergraduates are faced with information overload, a sense of isolation, and the cultural shift from the college experience as a time to…

Latent inhibition (LI) is a decrement in learning performance that results from the nonreinforced pre-exposure of the to-be-conditioned stimulus, in both vertebrates and invertebrates. In vertebrates, LI development involves dopamine and serotonin; in invertebrates there is yet no information. We studied differential olfactory conditioning of the…

Theories of attention are compatible with the idea that we can bias attention to avoid selecting objects that have known nontarget features. Although this may underlie several existing phenomena, the explicit guidance of attention away from known nontargets has yet to be demonstrated. Here we show that observers can use feature cues (i.e., color)…

In a glance, the visual system can provide a summary of some kinds of information about objects in a scene. We explore how summary information about "orientation" is extracted and find that some representations of orientation are privileged over others. Participants judged the average orientation of either a set of 6 bars or 6 circular…

According to the action-specific account of perception, perceivers see the environment relative to their ability to perform the intended action. For example, in a modified version of the computer game Pong, balls that were easier to block looked to be moving slower than balls that were more difficult to block (Witt & Sugovic, 2010). It is unknown,…

Two experiments investigated the influence of perceptual fluency on recognition memory. Words were studied using a shallow encoding task to decrease the contribution of recollection on recognition. Fluency was manipulated by blurring half of the test probes. Clarity varied randomly across trials in one experiment and was grouped into two blocks…

Communication and navigation in real environments rely heavily on the ability to distinguish objects in acoustic space. However, auditory spatial information is often corrupted by conflicting cues and noise such as acoustic reflections. Fortunately the brain can apply mechanisms at multiple levels to emphasize target information and mitigate such…

Aesthetic theories have long suggested perceptual advantages for prototypical exemplars of a given class of objects or events. Empirical evidence confirmed that morphed (quantitatively averaged) human faces, musical interpretations, and human voices are preferred over most individual ones. In this study, biological human motion was morphed and…

It is well established that scenes and objects elicit a highly selective response in specific brain regions in the ventral visual cortex. An inherent difference between these categories that has not been explored yet is their perceived distance from the observer (i.e. scenes are distal whereas objects are proximal). The current study aimed to test…

In two experiments, the authors evaluated the extent to which (a) individuals preferred engaging in object stereotypy versus observing an experimenter while the experimenter engaged in object stereotypy and (b) an experimenter's engagement in object stereotypy decreased the participants' engagement in object stereotypy. Results of Experiment 1…

Purpose: In this article, a new signal-processing algorithm is proposed and evaluated for the suppression of the combined effects of reverberation and noise. Method: The proposed algorithm decomposes, on a short-term basis (every 20 ms), the reverberant stimuli into a number of channels and retains only a subset of the channels satisfying a…

Purpose: The ability to detect a tone added to a random masker improves when a preview of the masker is provided. In 2 experiments, the authors explored the role that perceptual organization plays in this release from masking. Method: Detection thresholds were measured in informational masking studies. The maskers were drawn at random prior to…

Purpose: In this study, the authors sought to determine whether reduced audible bandwidth associated with hearing loss contributes to difficulty benefiting from an onset asynchrony between sounds. Method: Synthetic double-vowel identification was measured for normal-hearing listeners and listeners with hearing loss. One vowel (Target 2) was 250 ms…