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Examining emotion recognition and response to music can isolate recognition of and resonance with emotion from the confounding effects of other social cues (e.g., faces). In a within-sample design, participants aged 5–6 years in the eastern region of the United States (N = 135, Mage = 5.98, SDage =.54; 78 female, 56 male; eight Asian, 43 Black, 62 White, 13 biracial, and nine "other") listened to clips of calm, scary, and sad music. In separate sessions, participants identified the emotional content of the music or reported on the feelings elicited by the music clip, with above-chance accuracy. Emotion recognition was associated with age and higher levels of child emotional verbal expressivity. Children with higher parent-reported empathy reported greater resonance with the emotion conveyed by music, specifically for sad music. Recognition and resonance were correlated (i.e., alignment), although the relationship varied as a function of the emotion expressed, with the greatest alignment for sad music. Results provide insights into emotion recognition and resonance in the absence of direct social signals and provide evidence that children's ability to recognize and resonate with emotion differs depending on characteristics of the music and the child. Public Significance Statement: Our research contributes to how music perception and response can uniquely further our understanding of emotional development. Children accurately recognize and resonate with the emotions conveyed in music. We discuss translational implications for leveraging music as a tool to understand and improve socioemotional competence in children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We presented 28 Spanish monolingual and 28 Catalan–Spanish close-language bilingual 5-year-old children with a video of a talker speaking in the children's native language and a nonnative language and examined the temporal dynamics of their selective attention to the talker's eyes and mouth. When the talker spoke in the children's native language, monolinguals attended equally to the eyes and mouth throughout the trial, whereas close-language bilinguals first attended more to the mouth and then distributed attention equally between the eyes and mouth. In contrast, when the talker spoke in a nonnative language (English), both monolinguals and bilinguals initially attended more to the mouth and then gradually shifted to a pattern of equal attention to the eyes and mouth. These results indicate that specific early linguistic experience has differential effects on young children's deployment of selective attention to areas of a talker's face during the initial part of an audiovisual utterance. Public Significance Statement: This study shows that selective attention to a talker's face is a temporally dynamic process that depends on prior linguistic experience. Close-language 5-year-old bilingual children exhibited greater initial attention to a talker's mouth than did monolingual children. This suggests that regular and continuous experience with two close languages modulates how audiovisual speech cues are exploited, primarily at the start of communicative bouts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of vocalic behavior in resolving high-conflict situations. A quantitative study was employed using 277 university students from California and Florida. We experimentally tested a vocal coding system using passive, aggressive, and assertive audio clips presented to research subjects, which included volume, pitch, rate, pausing, and vocal variety. Participants rated these audio clips based on vocal qualities, relational outcomes, appropriateness, and resolving conflict. Results revealed that the assertive vocal style was associated with higher ratings to resolve conflict and perceptions of verbal assertiveness and appropriateness than were passive or aggressive vocal styles. Implications and applications are discussed to stimulate future research among researchers and practitioners when addressing conflict situations. Public Significance Statement: This study tested the effects of different vocal qualities on perceptions of conflict. The results found that the assertive vocal style (as opposed to aggressive or passive) was most conducive to resolving conflict and wanting to work with a partner in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We experience the world in terms of both (continuous) time and (discrete) events, but time seems especially primitive--since we cannot perceive events without an underlying temporal medium. It is all the more intriguing, then, to discover that event segmentation can itself influence howwe perceive the passage of time. We demonstrated this using a novel "rhythmic reproduction" task, in which people listened to irregular sequences of musical tones, and then immediately reproduced those rhythmic patterns from memory. Each sequence contained a single salient (and entirely task-irrelevant) perceptual event boundary, but the temporal placement of that boundary varied acrossmultiple trials in which people reproduced the same underlying rhythmic pattern. Reproductions were systematically influenced by event boundaries in two complementary ways: tones immediately following event boundarieswere delayed (being effectively played "too late" in the reproductions), while tones immediately preceding event boundaries were sped up (being effectively played "too early"). This demonstrates how event segmentation influences time perception in subtle and nonuniform ways that go beyond global temporal distortions--with dilation across events, but contraction within events. Events structure temporal experience, facilitating a give-and-take between the subjective expansion and contraction of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of the voice in everyday communication is vital for our understanding of human interaction. The singing of popular music often amplifies vocal features from speech, which can provide insights into vocal activity in the context of the intense emotional impact of music. Three studies with a mixed-methods approach aimed at evaluating rationales and features of disliked voices in the context of popular music. In an interview study (n = 20), rationales and features for disliked voices were identified using self-selected voices. In a group testing session (n = 48) and an online survey (n = 216), these disliked voices were presented to new participants, and the vocal features and evoked emotions by the singers were investigated, assuming that the participants did not have strong opinions about the voices. The results showed that participants justified their dislikes based on object-related/sound and emotional reasons, similar to findings from studies on musical taste. Specific features of disliked voices were confirmed in the following studies, including a specific feature of popular singing styles, the twang, perceived as a squeaky and nasal sound. Further disliked features include a pressed sound, imprecise and ordinary articulation, and a uniform expression. Notably, a rough voice was no predictor of aesthetic judgments. Evoked feelings relate to vocal features with similar tension levels. The measures created in the current study will also be informative for studying voice perception and evaluation more generally, which is a tool to evaluate vocal expression and items to evaluate reasons for disliked voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can we become aware of auditory stimuli retrospectively, even if they initially failed to reach awareness? Here, we tested whether spatial cueing of attention after a word had been played could trigger retrospective conscious access. Two sound streams were presented dichotically. One stream was attended for a primary task of speeded semantic categorization. The other stream included occasional target words, which had to be identified as a secondary task after the trial. We observed that cueing attention to the secondary stream improved identification accuracy, even when cueing occurred more than 500 ms after the target offset. In addition, such "retro-cueing" boosted the detection sensitivity and subjective audibility of the target. The effect was a perceptual one and not one based on enhancing or protecting conscious representations already available in working memory, as shown by quantitative models of the experimental data. In particular, the retro-cue did not gradually shift audibility but rather sharply changed the balance between fully audible and not audible trials. Together with remarkably similar results in vision, these results point to a previously unsuspected temporal flexibility of conscious access as a core feature of perception, across modalities. Public Significance Statement: This study demonstrates that a cue presented after a sound has ended can still retrospectively trigger its conscious perception. As similar observations had been made in vision, we suggest that temporal flexibility of conscious access is a general and useful feature of perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental trajectories. There is a limited understanding of how perceptual and cognitive development influences learning as prior studies have examined separate participants in a single modality. The current study presents a comprehensive assessment of category learning in 8–12-year-old children (12 female; 34 white, 1 Asian, 1 more than one race; M household income $85–$100 K) and 18–61-year-old adults (13 female; 32 white, 10 Black or African American, 4 Asian, 2 more than one race, 1 other; M household income $40–55 K) in a broad sample collected online from the United States. Across multiple sessions, participants learned categories across modalities (auditory, visual) that engage different learning systems (explicit, procedural). Unsurprisingly, adults outperformed children across all tasks. However, this enhanced performance was asymmetrical across categories and modalities. Adults far outperformed children in learning visual explicit categories and auditory procedural categories, with fewer differences across development for other types of categories. Adults' general benefit over children was due to enhanced information processing, while their superior performance for visual explicit and auditory procedural categories was associated with less cautious correct responses. These results demonstrate an interaction between perceptual and cognitive development that influences learning of categories that may correspond to the development of real-world skills such as speech perception and reading. Public Significance Statement: Category learning is a fundamental ability that supports complex processes across modalities and across the lifespan. We investigate learning of auditory and visual categories in 8–12-year-old children and adults. Categories that relate to real-world learning challenges children encounter in speech perception and reading are learned much better in adults than children and are associated with distinct decision processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parent language input is a well-established predictor of child language development. Multisensory attention skills (MASks; intersensory matching, shifting and sustaining attention to audiovisual speech) are also known to be foundations for language development. However, due to a lack of appropriate measures, individual differences in these skills have received little research focus. A newly established measure, the Multisensory Attention Assessment Protocol (MAAP), allows researchers to examine predictive relations between early MASks and later outcomes. We hypothesized that, along with parent language input, multisensory attention to social events (faces and voices) in infancy would predict later language outcomes. We collected data from 97 children (predominantly White and Hispanic, 48 mates) participating in an ongoing longitudinal study assessing 12-, 18-, and 24-month MASks (MAAP) and parent language input (quality, quantity), and 18- and 24-month language outcomes (child speech production, vocabulary size). Results revealed 1 2-month intersensory matching (but not maintaining or shifting attention) of faces and voices in the presence of a distractor was a strong predictor of language. It predicted a variety of 18- and 24-month child language outcomes (expressive vocabulary, child speech production), even when holding traditional predictors constant: parent language input and SES (maternal education: 52% bachelor's degree or higher), Further, at each age, parent language input predicted just one outcome. expressive vocabulary, and SES predicted child speech production. These novel findings reveal infant intersensory matching of faces and voices in the presence of a distractor can predict which children might benefit most from parent language input and show better language outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current article investigated the effects of direct and observational learning of auditory matching protocol on two twin boys' articulation. During the intervention, Max received direct instruction on matching auditory stimuli using the Sounds the Same app, while his twin Ryan learned through observing his brother's responses and the consequences he received. A multiple probe design was used for each participant. The results show that both boys' articulation improved after the auditory matching protocol. The data provided evidence that both direct and indirect instructions of the auditory matching protocol were effective. The role of vicarious learning and optimizing intervention efficiency during observational learning were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Words influence cognition well before infants know their meanings. For example, three-month-olds are more likely to form visually based categories when exemplars are paired with spoken words than with sine-wave tones, a likely precursor to learning symbolic relations between words and their referents. However, it is unclear why words have these effects. In 3 experiments we tested the hypothesis that exaggerated "showing" gestures used when naming objects, and the resultant cross-modal synchrony between a name and object motion. can affect object categorization. Participants were 119 3-month-old infants (56 were female and 63 were male). According to caregiver report, the sample was composed of European American (N = 114) Black (N = 6), Hispanic (N = 2) and multiracial (N = 6) infants. Participants were growing up predominantly in homes with at least I parent who completed a college education or a higher degree (80%), and the remaining 20% completed high school. After replicating evidence that words and tones have different effects on categorization, we found that prefamiliarizing infants with tone-object synchrony leads tones to influence categorization as words do. Moreover, we found that concentrated experience with word-object synchrony enhances the effects that words themselves have on categorization. Thus, temporal structure within caregivers' communicative behaviors may lead words to facilitate categorization, and ultimately to aid in forming symbolic representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's development and education take place in educational buildings with highly complex acoustic scenes, including spatially distributed target speakers, many surrounding distracting sounds, and general background noises. Auditory selective attention, therefore, is a valuable tool to orient oneself, to focus on specific sound sources, and to extract relevant information. Until now, it is unknown to what extent children have developed the cognitive processes of intentional attention control in spatial situations and how they differ from adults. This work provides a paradigm to examine children's intentional switching of auditory selective attention that also allows to examine effects due to noisy and spatial sound environments presented virtually via headphones. A listening experiment was conducted in Germany with 24 children (6-10 years, 50% female) and 24 young adults (18-26 years, 50% female). First, results revealed higher error rates and lower reaction times in conditions with noise (relative to conditions without noise) for children, but not for adults. This assumes that children are more sensitive to noise and conclude faster with noise trials, taking errors into account. Second, although auditory attention flexibility reflected in attention switch and relevant information selection was comparable between children and adults, it was found that adults benefited from spatial cues when selecting the relevant information. This was not observed to the same extent in children. These results suggest that children's cognitive processes are affected at significantly lower noise levels than adults and that noise effect assessment methods should consider spatial aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Investigate the use of repetitive delivery of task-related auditory cues, known as targeted memory reactivation (TMR), throughout a 1-hour daytime nap to enhance motor learning in individuals with chronic stroke. Research Method: Participants with a history of stroke at least 6 months prior were recruited to perform a novel overhand throwing task to randomly appearing target locations using the nonparetic upper extremity immediately before and after a 1-hour daytime nap. Half of the participants received TMR during the nap. Results: Participants who received TMR demonstrated a greater overall reduction in absolute and variable spatial errors relative to the NoTMR control group. Both groups demonstrated similar generalization of skill to 2 untrained variants of the trained task, but not to a novel untrained task. Conclusions: This study suggests that TMR may enhance motor learning after stroke. Future studies should investigate whether TMR can lead to improvements of the paretic upper extremity during clinically based rehabilitation interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have used task-related and "static" resting-state fMRI (RS-fMRI) to investigate the neural basis of pitch identification (PI) ability in nonmusicians. Recent studies have shown that RSfMRI is of nonstationarity, so "dynamic" RS-fMRI is needed to capture the temporal variability and the different internal states (in terms of regional interactions) in the brain networks. Using a large sample of Chinese nonmusicians (N = 320, with 56 of whom having musical training) and applying the sliding windows method, the current study examined the associations among musical training, PI ability, and dynamic resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC). Results showed that musical training was associated with increased dynamic RSFC within the networks for the following cognitive functions: working memory, language, attention, motor control, vision, and auditory perception. For participants with musical training, PI ability was associated with dynamic RSFC within the networks for the following cognitive functions: working memory, attention, and executive control. For participants without musical training, PI ability was associated with dynamic RSFC within the networks for auditory and visuospatial perception. These results from dynamic RSFC supplemented earlier results based on static RSFC, suggesting that dynamic RSFC is a potential tool for evaluating music cognition or music ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is marked by alterations in emotional functioning, physiological reactivity, and attention. Neural reactivity to acoustic startle stimuli can be used to understand brain functions related to these alterations. Investigations of startle reactivity in PTSD have yielded inconsistent findings, which may reflect the heterogeneity of the disorder. Furthermore, little is known of how the common co-occurrence of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI; i.e., concussion) may influence neural reactivity. We examined the event-related potentials (ERPs) of combat veterans (n = 102) to acoustic startle probes delivered during viewing of pleasant, neutral, unpleasant, and combat-related pictures. Interview-based assessments yielded dimensional characterizations of PTSD and mTBI. The P3 ERP response to startle probes was reduced during all affective relative to neutral pictures but failed to be associated with a PTSD diagnosis. However, two separable domains of PTSD symptomatology were associated with startle ERPs regardless of the picture conditions. Maladaptive avoidance was associated with smaller N1, P2, and P3 amplitudes, while intrusive reexperiencing was associated with larger P2 amplitudes. There were no main effects of mTBI. Findings suggest that level of symptomatology rather than a formal diagnosis of PTSD better explains alterations in neural reactivity after traumatic events, while mild brain injuries have little impact. Avoidance symptoms of PTSD may dampen neural functions that facilitate reorientation to threat while intrusive reexperiencing of traumatic events appears to heighten sensory reactivity. Considering specific aspects of symptomatology provides insight into the neural basis of trauma-related psychopathology and may help guide individualization of clinical interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are able to compare intensities across different sorts of stimuli, like in matching the brightness of visual stimuli of different hue, or the loudness of auditory stimuli of different spectral shapes. We can even match the brightness of a visual stimulus to the loudness of a tone, and vice versa. The termcross-dimensionalmatching is used to subsume these kinds of intra- and cross-modal tasks. The often replicated regression effect in crossdimensional matching relates to the observation that the intensity of whatever stimulus is adjusted exhibits a tendency toward some mean magnitude, which is interpreted as serving as an internal reference. Internal references, however, are not part of psychophysical theory in the tradition of Stevens. They form a key ingredient for the theory of global psychophysics initiated by R. Duncan Luce, which also makes explicit Stevens' assumption of an underlying ratio scale of perceived intensity towhich all sensations map, and renders it empirically testable. The present article generalizes Luce's theory of cross-dimensional magnitude production (Luce et al., 2010) to integrate potentially role-dependent internal references (pertaining to the standard, or the adjusted stimulus) as suggested by the regression effect. Reconsidering available empirical evidence for magnitude production and matching experiments in the light of these theoretical developments leads to a coherent picture. The results indicate that internal references are role-dependent in cross-dimensional tasks (intra- or cross-modal), but role-independent in intra-dimensional tasks. Moreover, predictions derived from the generalized theory provide a close fit to classical matching data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers of aesthetics universally agree that visual and auditory stimuli may be considered beautiful. Divergently, controversy greets the question "Can olfactory or gustatory experiences be conceptualized as beautiful?" In Study 1 participants inhaled Joy® perfume applied to a cotton pad for 30 s and immediately completed the AESTHEMOS (Schindler et al., 2017), a scale measuring aesthetic emotions. Results indicated stronger prototypical (feeling of beauty and liking, fascination, being moved, and awe), pleasing (joy, humor, vitality, energy, and relaxation), and epistemic (surprise, interest, intellectual challenge, and insight) aesthetic emotions, and fewer negative aesthetic emotions (feeling of ugliness, boredom, confusion, anger, uneasiness, and sadness), were elicited by the perfume compared with a no-scent control condition. Results showed 36% of participants found some beauty in the perfume experience. Study 2 showed significantly higher prototypical and pleasing aesthetic emotions, and less negative aesthetic emotions were stimulated by a Werther's caramel candy compared with a control condition (an unflavored sugar cube); and 45% of participants found some beauty in the taste. In both studies the findings were unrelated to participants' levels of trait appreciation of beauty, as measured by the Engagement with Beauty Scale—Revised (EBS-R; Diessner, Pohling, Stacy, & Güsewell, 2018). In Study 3 we found that when the EBS-R predicted the response to an artwork, it did not predict gustatory beauty; and when the EBS-R predicted olfactory beauty, it did not predict the beauty of an artwork. Thus, the general trait of appreciating beauty, as measured by the EBS-R, may not extend to olfactory or gustatory beauty. The results are discussed in the context of philosophical approaches and empirical aesthetic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To clarify the involvement of the cerebellum in impaired sensory integration in patients with schizophrenia, 52 first-episode patients with schizophrenia and 52 age- and sex-matched healthy controls underwent a verified sensory integration imaging task to examine the whole-brain dysfunction underlying impaired sensory integration. The familiality of cerebellar activation when integrating sensory stimuli was investigated in 25 siblings of the patients with schizophrenia, while the heritability of cerebellar activation was estimated in 56 monozygotic twins and 56 dizygotic twins. In addition, the functional connectivity between the cerebellum and the remaining regions of the whole brain was explored with psychophysiological interaction analysis. Relative to healthy controls, patients with schizophrenia showed reduced cerebellar activation when performing the sensory integration task in the whole-brain analysis. This reduced cerebellar activation was also found in the siblings of patients with schizophrenia, but to a lesser extent compared with schizophrenia patients. Cerebellar activation during sensory integration was also found to be significantly heritable. Furthermore, dysconnectivity within the cerebellum was found in patients with schizophrenia when integrating auditory and visual stimuli. These findings highlight the role of cerebellar dysfunction in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia symptoms and its potential role as an endophenotype of schizophrenia spectrum disorders. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mental control of musical imagery is a complex but understudied process that consists of 2 components: initiation--whether the musical imagery experience began voluntarily or involuntarily--and management-- whether instances of control occur after the experience has begun (e.g., changing the song). The present research examined these 2 components using 11 lab tasks measuring both initiation and management abilities in a sample of 203 undergraduate students. The tasks varied in stimuli composition: 7 tasks used tones and tonal sequences frequently used as stimuli in auditory imagery research, and 4 tasks used stimuli resembling the contents of everyday musical imagery (i.e., song excerpts). Initiation and management abilities were closely related, and people with greater musical expertise showed a smaller difference between initiation and management ability. Similarly, performance on tasks using tones or tonal sequences and tasks using song stimuli was closely related, and people didn't differ in performance as a function of stimulus type. The present research demonstrates that people's ability to initiate and to manage musical imagery is strongly linked and that people are equally good at controlling relatively simple musical imagery and imagery of well-known songs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alterations in the balance between prior expectations and sensory evidence may account for faulty perceptions and inferences leading to psychosis. However, uncertainties remain about the nature of altered prior expectations and the degree to which they vary with the emergence of psychosis. We explored how expectations arising at two different levels-cognitive and perceptual-influenced processing of sensory information and whether relative influences of higher- and lower-level priors differed across people with prodromal symptoms and those with psychotic illness. In two complementary auditory perception experiments, 91 participants (30 with first-episode psychosis, 29 at clinical risk for psychosis, and 32 controls) were required to decipher a phoneme within ambiguous auditory input. Expectations were generated in two ways: an accompanying visual input of lip movements observed during auditory presentation or through written presentation of a phoneme provided prior to auditory presentation. We determined how these different types of information shaped auditory perceptual experience, how this was altered across the prodromal and established phases of psychosis, and how this relates to cingulate glutamate levels assessed by magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The psychosis group relied more on high-level cognitive priors compared to both healthy controls and those at clinical risk for psychosis and relied more on low-level perceptual priors than the clinical risk group. The risk group was marginally less reliant on low-level perceptual priors than controls. The results are consistent with previous theory that influences of prior expectations in perceptions in psychosis differ according to level of prior and illness phase. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the influence of film music on the emotional perception of unambiguous semantically (in)congruent audiovisual film scenes. We predicted that the visual stimulus would dominate the emotional perception of the combined audiovisual stimuli and that a sarcastic or melancholic effect would be conveyed when the visual and musical stimuli are semantically incongruent. Therefore, one visual stimulus and one musical stimulus clearly representing one of the four emotions (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness) were chosen and combined in a congruent and incongruent way with each other. Utilizing an online experimental methodology, participants watched 16 stimulus combinations, rating them in terms of the perceived emotions (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness) and the emotional effects (melancholy and sarcasm) on a unipolar 5-point Likert scale. In addition, participants rated the perceived congruence between image and music for each stimulus. The results showed that the perceived audiovisual emotion was determined by the visual emotion, and semantically incongruent music was able to decrease the visually perceived emotions, compared to the congruent condition. Furthermore, a sarcastic effect was perceived when happy music accompanied negatively valent visual content. The results also showed that the perception of a melancholic effect was influenced by sad film music. The study provides further empirical foundations for the interaction of visual and auditory sensory channels, and its effect on the emotional perception of film scenes. Thus, it contributes to the understanding of audiovisual perception and highlights the importance of both film content and film music on the interpretation of a scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joint engagement—the sharing of events during social interactions—is an important context for early learning. To date, sharing topics that are only heard has not been systematically documented. To describe the development of auditory joint engagement, 48 child–parent dyads were observed 5 times from 12 to 30 months during seminaturalistic play. Reactions to 4 types of sounds—overheard speech about the child, instrumental music, animal calls, and mechanical noises—were observed before and as parents scaffolded shared listening and after the sound ceased. Before parents reacted, even 12-month-old infants readily alerted and oriented to the sounds; over time they increasingly tried to share new sounds with their parents. When parents then joined in sharing a sound, periods of auditory joint engagement often ensued, increasing from two thirds of 12-month observations to almost ceiling level at the 18- through 30-month observations. Overall, the developmental course and structure of auditory joint engagement and joint engagement with multimodal objects and events are remarkably similar. Symbol-infused auditory joint engagement occurred rarely at first but increased steadily. Children's labeling of the sound and parents' language scaffolding also increased linearly while child pointing toward it rose until 18 months and then declined. Future studies should address variations in the development of auditory joint engagement, whether autism spectrum disorder affects how toddlers share sounds, and the role auditory joint engagement may play in gestural and language development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preterm birth (<37 gestational weeks) is associated with long-term risks for health and neurodevelop- ment, but recently, studies have also started exploring how preterm birth affects early language development in the 1st year of life. Because the timing and quality of auditory and visual input is very different for preterm versus full-term infants, audiovisual speech perception in early development may be particularly sensitive to preterm birth. We tested extremely preterm to late preterm infants at 8 months postnatal age (28 to 36 weeks of gestation), as well as 2 full-term comparison groups with similar postnatal (8 months) and maturational (6 months) ages, on visual scanning of a video showing a French--English bilingual woman speaking in the infants' native language (French) and a nonnative language (English). Preterm infants showed similar scanning patterns for both languages, failing to differentiate between native and nonnative languages in their looking, unlike both groups of full-term infants, who looked more to the eyes than the mouth for the native language compared with the nonnative language. No clear relationship between scanning patterns and degree of prematurity was found. These findings are the first to show that audiovisual speech perception is affected in even later-born preterm infants, thus identifying a particularly sensitive deficit in early speech processing. Further research will need to investigate how preterms' special vulnerability in audiovisual speech processing may contribute to the other language difficulties found in these populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to compose music is becoming mainstream. Yet, there is a concern that listeners may have biases against AIs. Here, we test the hypothesis that listeners will like music less if they think it was composed by an AI. In Study 1, participants listened to excerpts of electronic and classical music and rated how much they liked the excerpts and whether they thought they were composed by an AI or human. Participants were more likely to attribute an AI composer to electronic music and liked music less that they thought was composed by an AI. In Study 2, we directly manipulated composer identity by telling participants that the music they heard (electronic music) was composed by an AI or by a human, yet we found no effect of composer identity on liking. We hypothesized that this was due to the "AI-sounding" nature of electronic music. Therefore, in Study 3, we used a set of "human-sounding" classical music excerpts. Here, participants liked the music less when it was purportedly composed by an AI. We conclude with implications of the AI composer bias for understanding perception of AIs in arts and aesthetic processing theories more broadly. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

While our perceptual experience seems to unfold continuously over time, episodic memory preserves distinct events for storage and recollection. Previous work shows that stability in encoding context serves to temporally bind individual items into sequential composite events. This phenomenon has been almost exclusively studied using visual and spatial memory paradigms. Here we adapt these paradigms to test the role of speaker regularity for event segmentation of complex auditory information. The results of our auditory paradigm replicate the findings in other sensory modalities-finding greater within-event temporal memory for items within speaker-bound events and greater source memory for items at speaker or event transitions. The task we use significantly extends the ecological validity of past paradigms by allowing participants to encode the stimuli without any suggestions on the part of the experimenter. This unique property of our design reveals that, while memory performance is strongly dependent on self-reported mnemonic strategy, behavioral effects associated with event segmentation are robust to changes in mnemonic strategy. Finally, we consider the effect of serial position on segmentation effects during encoding and present a modeling approach to estimate the independent contribution of event segmentation. These findings provide several lines of evidence suggesting that contextual stability in perceptual features drives segmentation during word listening and supports a modality-independent role for mechanisms involved in event segmentation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Lexical access is highly contextual. For example, vowel (rime) information is prioritized over tone in the lexical access of isolated words in Mandarin Chinese, but these roles are flipped in constraining contexts. The time course of these contextual effects remains unclear, and so here we tracked the real-time eye gaze of native Mandarin speakers in a visual-world paradigm. While listening to a noun classifier, before the target noun was even uttered, gaze to the target noun was already greater than looking to phonologically unrelated distractors. Critically, there was also more distraction from a cohort competitor (tone information) than a segmental competitor (vowel information) in more semantically constraining contexts. Results confirm that phonological activation in Mandarin lexical access is highly sensitive to context, with tone taking priority over vowel information even before a target word is heard. Results suggest that phonological activation in real-time lexical access may be highly context-specific across languages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

It has been argued that there is a "subjective present" or "experienced moment" of about 3 seconds in duration, involving automatic binding of events into perceptual units on that time scale. Research on topics that have been taken as relevant to this proposal is reviewed. The topics include accuracy in reproduction of stimulus durations, synchronization of behavior with a regular beat, mental rhythmization of a regular beat, time units in behavior, segmentation of observed behavior into meaningful units, time scale of reversals of perception with bistable ambiguous figures, time scale of inhibition of return in visual search, and EEG responses to deviant stimuli in series of repeating stimuli. Most of the research findings were not consistent with the 3 s window hypothesis. The small amount of supportive evidence is better interpreted as effects of specific processing mechanisms, not as showing general temporal integration. The evidence shows that temporal integration occurs on multiple time scales and no particular duration is special, and that windows of temporal integration are defined in terms of information density, not in terms of duration. The subjective present is constructed through local temporal integration on multiple time scales, further integrated into a coherent global representation of what is going on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To evaluate the veracity of models of the mere exposure effect and to understand the processes that moderate the effect, we conducted a meta-analysis of the influence of repeated exposure on liking, familiarity, recognition, among other evaluations. We estimated parameters from 268 curve estimates drawn from 81 articles and revealed that the mere exposure effect was characterized by a positive slope and negative quadratic effect consistent with an inverted-U shaped curve. In fact, such curves were associated with (a) all visual, but not auditory stimuli; (b) exposure durations shorter than 10 s and longer than 1 min; (c) both homogeneous and heterogeneous presentation types; and (d) ratings that were taken after all stimuli were presented. We conclude that existing models for the mere exposure effect do not adequately account for the findings, and we provide a framework to help guide future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research explores how the trajectory of learning on a working memory task changes throughout the life span, and whether gains in working memory performance are exclusively a question of initial working memory capacity (WMC) or whether age exerts an independent effect. In a large, cross-sectional study of younger, middle-aged, and older adults, we examined learning on a widely used working memory task-the dual n-back task-over 20 sessions of practice. We found that, while all age groups improved on the task, older adults demonstrated less improvement on the task, and also reached a lower asymptotic maximum performance than younger adults. After controlling for initial WMC, we found that age exerted independent effects on training gains and asymptotic performance; older adults tended to improve less and reached lower levels of performance than younger adults. The difference between younger and older adults' rates of learning depended in part on initial WMC. These results suggest that age-related effects on working memory include not only effects on capacity, but also plasticity and the ability to improve on a task. (PsycINFO Database Record [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Converging results have shown that adults benefit from congruent multisensory stimulation in the identification of complex stimuli, whereas the developmental trajectory of the ability to integrate multisensory inputs in children is less well understood. In this study we explored the effects of audiovisual semantic congruency on identification of visually presented stimuli belonging to different categories, using a cross-modal approach. Four groups of children ranging in age from 6 to 13 years and adults were administered an object identification task of visually presented pictures belonging to living and nonliving entities. Stimuli were presented in visual, congruent audiovisual, incongruent audiovisual, and noise conditions. Results showed that children under 12 years of age did not benefit from multisensory presentation in speeding up the identification. In children the incoherent audiovisual condition had an interfering effect, especially for the identification of living things. These data suggest that the facilitating effect of the audiovisual interaction into semantic factors undergoes developmental changes and the consolidation of adult-like processing of multisensory stimuli begins in late childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sensitivity to auditory rhythmic structures in music and language is evident as early as infancy, but performance on beat perception tasks is often well below adult levels and improves gradually with age. While some research has suggested the ability to perceive musical beat develops early, even in infancy, it remains unclear whether adult-like perception of musical beat is present in children. The capacity to sustain an internal sense of the beat is critical for various rhythmic musical behaviors, yet very little is known about the development of this ability. In this study, 223 participants ranging in age from 4 to 23 years from the Las Vegas, Nevada, community completed a musical beat discrimination task, during which they first listened to a strongly metrical musical excerpt and then attempted to sustain their perception of the musical beat while listening to a repeated, beat-ambiguous rhythm for up to 14.4 s. They then indicated whether a drum probe matched or did not match the beat. Results suggested that the ability to identify the matching probe improved throughout middle childhood (8-9 years) and did not reach adult-like levels until adolescence (12-14 years). Furthermore, scores on the beat perception task were positively related to phonological processing, after accounting for age, short-term memory, and music and dance training. This study lends further support to the notion that children's capacity for beat perception is not fully developed until adolescence and suggests we should reconsider assumptions of musical beat mastery by infants and young children. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Rodents produce a variety of acoustic signals to communicate different types of information such as identity, reproductive state, or danger. The degree to which hearing sensitivity matches particular frequencies of conspecific vocalizations may provide insight into the relative importance of different acoustic signals. In this experiment, we characterized vocal and footdrumming behaviors of white-throated woodrats ( Neotoma albigula ) and measured their hearing sensitivity using the auditory brainstem response. Adult and juvenile woodrats produced seven categories of vocalizations, with six categories containing frequencies that overlap their peak hearing sensitivity. In addition, woodrats produced low-frequency footdrumming signals in the presence of same- and opposite-sex social partners and in social isolation. Woodrats varied spectral and temporal characteristics of vocalizations based on social composition of the dyad. Woodrat audition spanned 1 to 42 kHz, with a broad range of best hearing sensitivity between 4 and 20 kHz. Compared to other rodents that primarily produce high-frequency vocalizations in social contexts, woodrat audition was more sensitive to low frequencies that typify their vocal repertoire. Our results suggest that the auditory system of white-throated woodrats is broadly tuned to detect behaviorally relevant acoustic signals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Previous research suggests that attachment avoidance is robustly linked to memory errors of omission-such as forgetting information or events that have occurred. Moreover, these avoidance-related errors of omission are the strongest for relational stimuli (e.g., avoidant people have trouble remembering relationship-related words, but not neutral ones). Conversely, an emerging body of studies has linked attachment anxiety to memory errors of commission-such as falsely remembering events that never actually happened. The present article describes three studies ( N s = 204, 651, 547) that replicate the correlation between attachment anxiety and false memories. Moreover, the present studies experimentally explored the boundary conditions under which anxiety might predict false memories. Results indicated that attachment anxiety predicts false memories only when participants could see a video of another person conveying information-but not when reading a text transcript of the same information or when listening to the audio only. This is consistent with prior studies which suggest that highly attachment-anxious individuals are hypervigilant to others' emotional expressions and may use them to make incorrect inferences (which potentially become falsely encoded into memory). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Previous studies on spoken word production have shown that native English speakers used phoneme-sized units (e.g., a word-initial phoneme, C) to produce English words, and native Mandarin Chinese speakers employed syllable-sized units (e.g., a word-initial consonant and vowel, CV) as phonological encoding units in Chinese. With spoken word production, although spoken word recognition is a fundamental language skill of human beings, it is unknown whether a Chinese-English bilingual listener can adjust the phonological unit sizes depending on the language used. Using four mouse-tracking spoken word recognition experiments, participants listened to spoken words (either presented in English or Chinese) while viewing a display of two written words. In Experiment 1, Chinese-English bilinguals experienced a larger phonological competition in the CV condition than the control condition, indicating that they recruited syllables when listening to Chinese monosyllabic words. Experiment 2 extended the results of Experiment 1 with a set of Chinese disyllabic words and further revealed the temporal distribution of syllable overlap of a spoken word constrains phonological competition. In Experiment 3, Chinese-English bilinguals exhibited a greater phonological competition in both CV and C conditions that mirrored those reported with English monolinguals in Experiment 4. Our results across experiments demonstrated that Chinese-English bilinguals employed both phonemes and syllables to recognize English spoken words but exclusively relied on syllables to recognize Chinese words, suggesting that there is flexibility in selecting phonological units when recognizing spoken words in the two languages. Implications for models of monolingual and bilingual spoken recognition are also discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

As a spoken word unfolds over time, similar sounding words ( cap and cat ) compete until one word "wins". Lexical competition becomes more efficient from infancy through adolescence. We examined one potential mechanism underlying this development: lexical inhibition, by which activated candidates suppress competitors. In Experiment 1, younger (7-8 years) and older (12-13 years) children heard words ( cap ) in which the onset was manipulated to briefly boost competition from a cohort competitor ( cat ). This was compared to a condition with a nonword ( cack ) onset that would not inhibit the target. Words were presented in a visual world task during which eye movements were recorded. Both groups showed less looking to the target when perceiving the competitor-splice relative to the nonword-splice, showing engagement of lexical inhibition. Exploratory analyses of linguistic adaptation across the experiment revealed that older children demonstrated consistent lexical inhibition across the experiment and younger children did not, initially showing no effect in the first half of trials and then a robust effect in the latter half. In Experiment 2, adults also displayed consistent lexical inhibition in the same task. These findings suggest that younger children do not consistently engage lexical inhibition in typical listening but can quickly bring it online in response to certain linguistic experiences. Computational modeling showed that age-related differences are best explained by increased engagement of inhibition rather than growth in activation. These findings suggest that continued development of lexical inhibition in later childhood may underlie increases in efficiency of spoken word recognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The perception of temporal order can help infer the causal structure of the world. By investigating the perceptual signatures of audiovisual temporal order in rats, we demonstrate the importance of the protocol design for reliable order processing. Rats trained with both reinforced audiovisual trials and non-reinforced unisensory trials (two consecutive tones or flashes) learned the task surprisingly faster than rats trained with reinforced multisensory trials only. They also displayed signatures of temporal order perception, such as individual biases and sequential effects that are well described in humans, and impaired in clinical populations. We conclude that an experimental protocol requiring individuals to process all stimuli in a sequence is compulsory to ensure temporal order processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

When children hear a novel word in a context presenting a novel object and a familiar one, they usually assume that the novel word refers to the novel object. In a series of experiments, we tested whether this behavior would be found when 2-year-olds interpreted novel words that differed phonologically from familiar words in only 1 sound, either a vowel or consonant. Under these conditions children almost always chose the familiar object, though examination of eye movements showed that children did detect the tested phonological distinctions. Thus, children discounted perceptible phonological variations when doing so permitted a resolution of the speaker's meaning without postulating a new word. Children with larger vocabularies made novel-word interpretations more often than children with smaller vocabularies did. The results suggest that although young children do interpret speech in terms of a learned phonological system, this does not mean that children assume that phonological distinctions imply lexical distinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a given that a live concert is fundamentally different from a recorded live performance, but we wanted to investigate in a controlled setting how different renditions of the same piece of music affected an audience. In our previous case study using Rachmaninoff's pieces, a pianist expressed richer affective nuances when he performed his artistic rendition of the piece than his contrived deadpan (i.e., mechanical) and exaggerated renditions (Shoda & Adachi, 2012). The primary goal of the present study was to show the role of presentation modality (i.e., sound-only, video-only, both) in the audience's perception of the multifaceted affective nuances projected in his artistic rendition as compared with those in the deadpan and the exaggerated renditions. Each of 106 participants experienced each rendition of the performances in sound-only, video-only, and sound and video modalities, and rated the perceived degree of its expressivity and affective nuances. We identified a 2-dimensional map for performer-to-audience communication of the complex affective nuances of music with multiple adjectives by means of exploratory positioning analysis, a multidimensional statistical technique for Likert-type ratings in within-participant design. As expected, visual clues indeed assisted an audience to decode a pianist's intended level of expressivity, but with a surprising twist: The affective nuances portrayed by the pianist in artistic rendition were communicated more successfully via auditory information alone. These results suggest that auditory and visual cues serve different roles in pianist-to-audience communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kinesthesis, the sense of muscular effort that accompanies bodily movement, is known to be important in musical performance. Less well understood is the role of the kinesthetic sense in musical listening. Recent observations that listening to music is associated with fast, subtle, pitch-related patterns of kinesthetic sensations that involve the ears, eustachian tubes, nasopharynx, vocal tract, and even muscles of facial expression challenges traditional accounts of auditory processing divorced from peripheral vocal input and suggests, instead, the hypothesis that auditory and vocal processing mechanisms rely on shared peripheral substrates in addition to shared central (brain-based) substrates. Furthermore, the presence of kinesthetic sensations that arise in response to novelty, following voluntary switches of attention and even in anticipation of familiar sounds suggests that the kinesthetic sense plays an important part in the listening process. Here, the significance of kinesthetic sensations associated with listening behavior is discussed within the context of recent MRI investigations (where pitch-related changes associated with vocal production are investigated under conditions that reduce articulatory and postural input to a minimum) together with evidence from a diverse range of historical and contemporary sources. Overall, evidence from a wide range of disciplines supports the hypothesis that auditory-vocal processing relies on shared peripheral substrates in addition to shared central substrates and suggests a framework within which kinesthetic vocal sensations may be further investigated. Wide-ranging implications arising from improved awareness of the part played by the kinesthetic sense in musical listening are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent study has shown that congenitally blind adults, who have never had visual experience, are impaired on an auditory spatial bisection task (Gori, Sandini, Martinoli, & Burr, 2014). In this study we investigated how thresholds for auditory spatial bisection and auditory discrimination develop with age in sighted and congenitally blind children (9 to 14 years old). Children performed 2 spatial tasks (minimum audible angle and space bisection) and 1 temporal task (temporal bisection). There was no impairment in the temporal task for blind children but, like adults, they showed severely compromised thresholds for spatial bisection. Interestingly, the blind children also showed lower precision in judging minimum audible angle. These results confirm the adult study and go on to suggest that even simpler auditory spatial tasks are compromised in children, and that this capacity recovers over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stimuli co-occurring with targets in a detection task are better remembered than stimuli co-occurring with distractors--the attentional boost effect (ABE). The ABE is of interest because it is an exception to the usual finding that divided attention during encoding impairs memory. The effect has been demonstrated in tests of item memory but it is unclear if context memory is likewise affected. Some accounts suggest enhanced perceptual encoding or associative binding, predicting an ABE on context memory, whereas other evidence suggests a more abstract, amodal basis of the effect. In Experiment 1, context memory was assessed in terms of an intramodal perceptual detail, the font and color of the study word. Experiment 2 examined context memory cross-modally, assessing memory for the modality (visual or auditory) of the study word. Experiments 3 and 4 assessed context memory with list discrimination, in which 2 study lists are presented and participants must later remember which list (if either) a test word came from. In all experiments, item (recognition) memory was also assessed and consistently displayed a robust ABE. In contrast, the attentional-boost manipulation did not enhance context memory, whether defined in terms of visual details, study modality, or list membership. There was some evidence that the mode of responding on the detection task (motoric response as opposed to covert counting of targets) may impact context memory but there was no evidence of an effect of target detection, per se. In sum, the ABE did not occur in context memory with verbal materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has established that there is a cognitive link between perception and production of the same movement. However, there has been relatively little research into the relevance of this for nonexpert perceivers, such as music listeners who do not play instruments themselves. In 2 experiments we tested whether participants can quickly learn new associations between sounds and observed movement without performing those movements themselves. We measured motor evoked potentials in the first dorsal interosseous muscle of participants' right hands while test tones were heard, and single transcranial magnetic stimulation pulses were used to trigger motor activity. In Experiment 1, participants in a "human" condition (n = 4) learnt to associate the test tone with finger movement of the experimenter, while participants in a "computer" condition (n = 4) learnt that the test tone was triggered by a computer. Participants in the human condition showed a larger increase in motor evoked potentials compared with those in the computer condition. In a second experiment pairing between sounds and movement occurred without participants repeatedly observing the movement, and we found no such difference between the human (n = 4) and computer (n = 4) conditions. These results suggest that observers can quickly learn to associate sound with movement, so it should not be necessary to have played an instrument to experience some motor resonance when hearing that instrument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the role of timbre for the perception of emotion in instrumental sounds. In 2 experiments, 180 stimuli were created by mixing sounds of 10 instruments (flute, clarinet, trumpet, tuba, piano, French horn, violin, guitar, saxophone, and bell). In Experiment 1a, participants received stimuli 1 at a time and rated the degree to which each stimulus sounded like each of the 10 instruments (i.e., timbre judgment). In Experiment 1b, participants received the same sound stimuli and rated whether these stimuli sounded happy, sad, angry, fearful, and disgusting (i.e., emotion judgment). The authors extracted acoustic features from these instrumental sounds and examined the extent to which these features could predict both emotion and timbre ratings made for the same sound stimuli. Our regression analysis showed that regularity, envelope centroid, sub band 2, and sub band 9 explained timbre and emotion ratings. The relationship between acoustic features and emotion judgments of basic emotions, however, was not uniform. Sub band 7, related to perceived activity in a sound, predicted anger, fear and disgust, but not sadness. Because sub band 7 could predict all emotions except for sadness, this indicates that some timbre-related features play a substantial role in the perception of emotion and that timbre could be a more useful indicator for specific emotions rather than emotion in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing evidence shows that individuals consistently match auditory pitch with visual size. For instance, high-pitched sounds are perceptually associated with smaller visual stimuli, whereas low-pitched sounds with larger ones. The present study explores whether this crossmodal correspondence, reported so far for perceptual processing, also modulates motor planning. To address this issue, we carried out a series of kinematic experiments to verify whether actions implying size processing are affected by auditory pitch. Experiment 1 showed that grasping movements toward small/large objects were initiated faster in response to high/low pitches, respectively, thus extending previous findings in the literature to more complex motor behavior. Importantly, auditory pitch influenced the relative scaling of the hand preshaping, with high pitches associated with smaller grip aperture compared with low pitches. Notably, no effect of auditory pitch was found in case of pointing movements (no grasp implied, Experiment 2), as well as when auditory pitch was irrelevant to the programming of the grip aperture, that is, in case of grasping an object of uniform size (Experiment 3). Finally, auditory pitch influenced also symbolic manual gestures expressing "small" and "large" concepts (Experiment 4). In sum, our results are novel in revealing the impact of auditory pitch on motor planning when size processing is required, and shed light on the role of auditory information in driving actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Simon effect for left-right visual stimuli previously has been shown to decrease across the reaction time (RT) distribution. This decrease has been attributed to automatic activation of the corresponding response, which then dissipates over time. In contrast, for left-right tone stimuli, the Simon effect has not been found to decrease across the RT distribution but instead tends to increase. It has been proposed that automatic activation occurs through visuomotor information transmission, whereas the auditory Simon effect reflects cognitive coding interference and not automatic activation. In 4 experiments, we examined distributions of the auditory Simon effect for RT, percentage error (PE), and an inverse efficiency score [IES = RT/(1 - PE)] as a function of tone frequency and duration to determine whether the activationdissipation account is also applicable to auditory stimuli. Consistent decreasing functions were found for the RT Simon effect distribution with short-duration tones of low frequency and for the PE and IES Simon effect distributions for all durations and frequency sets. Together, these findings provide robust evidence that left and right auditory stimuli also produce decreasing Simon effect distribution functions suggestive of automatic activation and dissipation of the corresponding response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how understandings of ordinary and extraordinary communication develop. Three- to 10-year-old children and adults (N = 183) were given scenarios in which a protagonist wanted help from a human (their parent) or from God. Scenarios varied in whether protagonists expressed their desires aloud (by asking) or silently (by hoping), whether (for human scenarios) parents were nearby or far away, and whether (for God scenarios) protagonists expressed desires through ordinary means (asking or hoping) or more extraordinary means (praying). Following each scenario, participants were asked whether the recipient (either the parent or God) was aware of the protagonist's desire. Children as young as 3 to 4 years old understood that both loudness and distance limit the effectiveness of human communication, reporting that humans would most likely be aware of desires when they were expressed both aloud and nearby. As well, by this age children reported that God would more often be aware of desires than would humans, but children of all ages often reported that God (like humans) would be more aware of desires expressed aloud (rather than silently). These concepts of ordinary and extraordinary communication continued to be refined through middle childhood. Children's performance on standard theory-of-mind tasks and participants' religious background predicted whether they attributed awareness to God. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A target sound can become more audible and may "pop out" from a simultaneously presented masker if the masker is presented first by itself, as a precursor. This phenomenon, known as auditory enhancement, may reflect the general perceptual principle of contrast enhancement, which facilitates adaptation to ongoing acoustic conditions and the detection of new events. Little is known about the mechanisms underlying enhancement, and potential confounding factors have made the size of the effect and its time course a point of contention. Here we measured enhancement as a function of precursor duration and delay between precursor offset and target onset, using 2 single-interval pitch comparison tasks, which involve either same-different or up-down judgments, to avoid the potential confounds of earlier studies. Although these 2 tasks elicit different levels of performance and may reflect different underlying mechanisms, they produced similar amounts of enhancement. The effect decreased with decreasing precursor duration, but remained present for precursors as short as 62.5 ms. and decreased with increasing gap between the precursor and target, but remained measurable 1 s after the precursor. Additional conditions, examining the effect of precursor/masker similarity and the possible role of grouping and cueing, suggest multiple sources of auditory enhancement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research indicates that age increases deviance distraction in cross-modal oddball tasks, but results are few and less conclusive in purely auditory oddball tasks, with 3 studies not reporting age-related increase in deviance distraction against 1 that did (d = 1.04). This study aimed to (a) examine the effect of age on deviance distraction using the largest sample size to date to ensure adequate statistical power and (b) extend the study of same-modality deviance distraction to the visual modality. We compared 42 young and 42 older adults in auditory and visual duration discrimination tasks in which stimuli were presented with rare and unexpected task-irrelevant changes in pitch (in the auditory task) or location (in the visual task). The statistical power of our experiment to detect an effect size (d) of 1.04 was .999. Our results showed deviance distraction (longer response times for deviant stimuli than for standard stimuli) in both modalities. Importantly, these effects did not vary with age. Strong support for the absence of age-related variation in deviance distraction was further demonstrated by Bayes factor analysis. We conclude that aging does not appear to increase behavioral distraction by deviant stimuli in samemodality oddball tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A test sequence of alternating low-frequency (A) and high-frequency (B) tones in a repeating . . ABAB . . pattern is more likely to be heard as 2 segregated streams of tones when it is preceded by an isofrequency inducer sequence whose frequency matches either the A- or B-tone frequency (e.g., . . BBBB . . .") of the test, a phenomenon referred to as stream biasing. Low-level processes such as stimulus-selective adaptation of frequency-tuned neurons within early auditory processing stages have been thought by some to mediate stream biasing; however, the current study tested for the involvement of higher level processes. Inducers whose frequency matched neither the A- nor B-tone frequency (e.g., ". . . CCCC . . .") sometimes facilitated stream biasing. Stream biasing was also sensitive to complex features of the inducer sequence, namely whether the rhythmic pattern of the inducer matched the rhythm of the ABAB test. Stream biasing occurred even when an 8-s silent interval separated the inducer and test sequences, a time span longer than previously recognized (Beauvois & Meddis, 1997). These results suggest the involvement of persistent activation of high-level representations that affect perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genetic epidemiological studies support a role for CNTNAP2 in developmental language disorders such as autism spectrum disorder, specific language impairment, and dyslexia. Atypical language development and function represent a core symptom of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), with evidence suggesting that aberrant auditory processing--including impaired spectrotemporal processing and enhanced pitch perception-- may both contribute to an anomalous language phenotype. Investigation of gene-brainbehavior relationships in social and repetitive ASD symptomatology have benefited from experimentation on the Cntnap2 knockout (KO) mouse. However, auditory-processing behavior and effects on neural structures within the central auditory pathway have not been assessed in this model. Thus, this study examined whether auditory-processing abnormalities were associated with mutation of the Cntnap2 gene in mice. Cntnap2 KO mice were assessed on auditory-processing tasks including silent gap detection, embedded tone detection, and pitch discrimination. Cntnap2 knockout mice showed deficits in silent gap detection but a surprising superiority in pitch-related discrimination as compared with controls. Stereological analysis revealed a reduction in the number and density of neurons, as well as a shift in neuronal size distribution toward smaller neurons, in the medial geniculate nucleus of mutant mice. These findings are consistent with a central role for CNTNAP2 in the ontogeny and function of neural systems subserving auditory processing and suggest that developmental disruption of these neural systems could contribute to the atypical language phenotype seen in autism spectrum disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]