Purpose: Voice and speech are rich with information about a speaker's personality and other features of identity. This study seeks to determine the extent to which listeners agree about speakers' social, physical, and personality attributes. Method: Two experiments were conducted. In the first experiment, listeners rated a group of speakers who…

According to the Gricean Maxim of Quantity, speakers provide the amount of information listeners require to correctly interpret an utterance, and no more (Grice in Logic and conversation, 1975). However, speakers do tend to violate the Maxim of Quantity often, especially when the redundant information improves reference precision (Degen et al. in…

How do infants learn the sounds of their native language when there are many simultaneous sounds competing for their attention? Adults and children detect when speech sounds change in complex scenes better than when other sounds change. We examined whether infants have similar biases to detect when human speech changes better than nonspeech sounds…

Purpose: This study aimed to gain more insight into the primary auditory abilities of children with significant residual hearing in order to improve decision making when choosing between bimodal fitting or sequential bilateral cochlear implantation. Method: Sound localization abilities, spatial release of masking, and fundamental frequency…

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impairments in social interaction, executive functioning, sensory-perceptual abilities and behaviour, such as anxious/depressed states, attention problems, aggression, or somatic complains. However, the dynamic relationship between these dimensions remains to be…

Interoceptive awareness refers to one's ability to detect, discriminate, and regulate internal bodily and mental processes. Interoceptive challenges in ASD remain under researched and poorly understood. In this study, we analyzed texts of adults who self-identify as autistic describing their interoceptive challenges. Many individuals described…

This report is a summary of two studies. In the first, we compared examples of Irish fiddle performances with Western classical violin performances. Acoustical analyses showed that both classical examples produced average spectral centroids higher in frequency, higher harmonic to noise ratios, more use of vibrato, more disjunct intervals, and less…

This paper explores how touch is key to understanding education--not as an achievement or an instrument of acquisition, but as a process through which one becomes a subject capable of both living and leading a life that matters for ourselves and others. As a process, it is concerned with how we encounter things and others in the world and not…

Using cannabis (e.g., smoking marijuana) is becoming popular, partly due to a legalization trend across different countries. This tendency has resulted in cannabis consumption being accepted by society as if it were harmless. However, evidence shows that the use of this drug has detrimental effects on cognitive, academic, and professional…

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can struggle with visual updating. In a previous picture morphing study (Burnett and Jellema 2012) adults with ASD recognized the second picture significantly later when seeing one picture gradually changing into another. The aim of the current study was to test whether this previously reported…

We extend decades of research on infants' visual processing by examining their eye gaze during viewing of natural scenes. We examined the eye movements of a racially diverse group of 4- to 12-month-old infants (N = 54; 27 boys; 24 infants were White and not Hispanic, 30 infants were African American, Asian American, mixed race and/or Hispanic) as…

Professions such as radiology and aviation security screening that rely on visual search--the act of looking for targets among distractors--often cannot provide operators immediate feedback, which can create situations where performance may be largely driven by the searchers' own expectations. For example, if searchers do not expect relatively…

When interpreting the meanings of visual features in information visualizations, observers have expectations about how visual features map onto concepts ("inferred mappings"). In this study, we examined whether aspects of inferred mappings that have been previously identified for colormap data visualizations generalize to a different…

Autism spectrum disorder is a pervasive neurodevelopmental disorder that has been linked to a range of perceptual processing alterations, including hypo- and hyperresponsiveness to sensory stimulation. A recently proposed theory that attempts to account for these symptoms, states that autistic individuals have a decreased ability to anticipate…

Prosody is the fundamental organizing principle of spoken language, carrying lexical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic information. It, therefore, provides highly relevant input for language development. Are infants sensitive to this important aspect of spoken language early on? In this study, we asked whether infants are able to discriminate…