A linked perceptual class consists of two distinct perceptual classes, A' and B', the members of which have become related to each other. For example, a linked perceptual class might be composed of many pictures of a woman (one perceptual class) and the sounds of that woman's voice (the other perceptual class). In this case, any sound of the…

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…

Although summer schools are a popular and widely used activity for widening participation in higher education, their impact on their participants' subsequent educational careers has not been widely researched. This article draws on qualitative and quantitative evidence from a study across the south west of England to suggest that participation in…

The effect of writing on the concurrent visual perception of letters was investigated in a series of studies using an interference paradigm. Participants drew shapes and letters while simultaneously visually identifying letters and shapes embedded in noise. Experiments 1-3 demonstrated that letter perception, but not the perception of shapes, was…

When turning without vision or audition, people tend to perceive their locomotion as a change in heading relative to objects in the remembered surroundings. Such perception of self-rotation depends on sensitivity to information for movement from biomechanical activity of the locomotor system or from inertial activation of the vestibular and…

A briefly presented target can be rendered invisible by a lingering sparse mask that does not even touch it. This form of visual backward masking, called object substitution masking, is thought to occur at the object level of processing. However, it remains unclear whether object-level interference alone produces substitution masking because…

This paper describes research on newborns' responses to music. Video observation and electroencephalogram (EEG) were collected to see whether newborns' responses to random sounds differed from their responses to music. The data collected were subjected to both qualitative and quantitative analysis. This paper will focus on the qualitative study,…

Speakers monitor their speech output by listening to their own voice. However, signers do not look directly at their hands and cannot see their own face. We investigated the importance of a visual perceptual loop for sign language monitoring by examining whether changes in visual input alter sign production. Deaf signers produced American Sign…

Our goal was to investigate auditory and speech perception abilities of children with and without reading disability (RD) and associations between auditory, speech perception, reading, and spelling skills. Participants were 9-year-old, Finnish-speaking children with RD (N = 30) and typically reading children (N = 30). Results showed significant…

Auditory evoked potentials are tools widely used to assess auditory cortex functions in clinical context. However, in cochlear implant users, electrophysiological measures are challenging due to implant-created artefacts in the EEG. Here, we used independent component analysis to reduce cochlear implant-related artefacts in event-related EEGs of…

This paper addresses effects of age and sex on certain acoustic properties of speech, given conflicting findings on such effects reported in prior research. The speech of 27 younger adults (15 women, 12 men; mean age 25.5 years) and 59 older adults (32 women, 27 men; mean age 75.2 years) was evaluated for identification of differences for sex and…

Acceleration is a fundamental concept in physics which is taught in mechanics at all levels. Here, we discuss some challenges in teaching this concept effectively when the path along which the object is moving has a curvature and centripetal acceleration is present. We discuss examples illustrating that both physics teachers and students have…

This study investigated neural activation patterns during verb processing in children, using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). Preschool children (aged 4-6) passively listened to lists of verbs and adjectives while neural activation was measured. Findings indicated that verbs were processed differently than adjectives, as the verbs…

During the first year of life, infants begin to have difficulties perceiving non-native vowel and consonant contrasts, thus adapting their perception to the phonetic categories of the target language. In this paper, we examine the perception of a non-segmental feature, i.e. stress. Previous research with adults has shown that speakers of French (a…

This study investigated the intelligibility and comprehensibility of natural speech in comparison to synthetic speech. The results demonstrate the type of errors; the relationship between intelligibility and comprehensibility; and the correlation between intelligibility and comprehensibility and key factors, such as the frequency of use of…