Single and multiple sense stimuli create sensescapes, which combine to be perceived as multisensory integrated products. Such encounters may be experienced across multiple spaces and have importance due to esthetic sensuality, cultural value, economic benefit, or religious significance. This article presents a methodological protocol for the…

Teaching tact and intraverbal responses based on function-feature-class to children with language delays can result in the emergence of untrained relational responses. The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of compound stimuli in discriminated operants (i.e., different combinations of hear, see, touch, and taste) on the acquisition…

The genetic diversity contained in a population can be used to engage the audience in an understanding of human genotypes and phenotypes. With a series of simple examples of well-documented sensory phenotypes related to the perception of colour, aromas or food preference, the diversity of the audience can be easily explored. The collecting of…

Understanding the nature of olfactory abnormalities is crucial for optimal interventions in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, previous studies that have investigated odor identification in children with ASD have produced inconsistent results. The ability to correctly identify an odor relies heavily on visual inputs in the…

The retrosplenial cortex supports navigation, with one role thought to be the integration of different spatial cue types. This hypothesis was extended by examining the integration of nonspatial cues. Rats with lesions in either the dysgranular subregion of retrosplenial cortex (area 30) or lesions in both the granular and dysgranular subregions…

"Chills" (frisson manifested as goose bumps or shivers) have been used in an increasing number of studies as indicators of emotions in response to music (e.g., Craig, 2005; Guhn, Hamm, & Zentner, 2007; McCrae, 2007; Panksepp, 1995; Sloboda, 1991). In this study we present evidence that chills can be induced through aural, visual, tactile, and…

Abstract concepts are traditionally thought to differ from concrete concepts by their lack of perceptual information, which causes them to be processed more slowly and less accurately than perceptually-based concrete concepts. In two studies, we examined this assumption by comparing concreteness and imageability ratings to a set of perceptual…

It is suggested that the distinction between global versus local processing styles exists across sensory modalities. Activation of one-way of processing in one modality should affect processing styles in a different modality. In 12 studies, auditory, haptic, gustatory or olfactory global versus local processing was induced, and participants were…

Recent neuroimaging research has shown that perceptual and conceptual processing share a common, modality-specific neural substrate, while work on modality switching costs suggests that they share some of the same attentional mechanisms. In three experiments, we employed a modality detection task that displayed modality-specific object properties…

To meet an increasing need to examine the neurophysiological underpinnings of behavior in rats, we developed a behavioral system for studying sensory processing, attention and discrimination learning in rats while recording firing patterns of neurons in one or more brain areas of interest. Because neuronal activity is sensitive to variations in…