Browsing by Subject "auditory"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Activation of the left planum temporale in pitch processing is shaped by language experience
    (Wiley, 2005-07-20) Xu, Yisheng; Gandour, Jackson; Talavage, Thomas; Wong, Donald; Dzemidzic, Mario; Tong, Yunxia; Li, Xiaojian; Lowe, Mark; Anatomy and Cell Biology, School of Medicine
    Implicit, abstract knowledge acquired through language experience can alter cortical processing of complex auditory signals. To isolate prelexical processing of linguistic tones (i.e., pitch variations that convey part of word meaning), a novel design was used in which hybrid stimuli were created by superimposing Thai tones onto Chinese syllables (tonal chimeras) and Chinese tones onto the same syllables (Chinese words). Native speakers of tone languages (Chinese, Thai) underwent fMRI scans as they judged tones from both stimulus sets. In a comparison of native vs. non‐native tones, overlapping activity was identified in the left planum temporale (PT). In this area a double dissociation between language experience and neural representation of pitch occurred such that stronger activity was elicited in response to native as compared to non‐native tones. This finding suggests that cortical processing of pitch information can be shaped by language experience and, moreover, that lateralized PT activation can be driven by top‐down cognitive processing.
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    The audio/visual mismatch and the uncanny valley: an investigation using a mismatch in the human realism of facial and vocal aspects of stimuli
    (2011-03-16) Szerszen, Kevin A.; MacDorman, Karl F.; Faiola, Anthony; Bolchini, Davide; Lu, Amy Shirong
    Empirical research on the uncanny valley has primarily been concerned with visual elements. The current study is intended to show how manipulating auditory variables of the stimuli affect participant’s ratings. The focus of research is to investigate whether an uncanny valley effect occurs when humans are exposed to stimuli that have an incongruity between auditory and visual aspects. Participants were exposed to sets of stimuli which are both congruent and incongruent in their levels of audio/visual humanness. Explicit measures were used to explore if a mismatch in the human realism of facial and vocal aspects produces an uncanny valley effect and attempt to explain a possible cause of this effect. Results indicate that an uncanny valley effect occurs when humans are exposed to stimuli that have an incongruity between auditory and visual aspects.
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    Auditory Attentional Disengagement in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
    (Springer, 2019-06-14) Keehn, Brandon; Kadlaskar, Girija; McNally Keehn, Rebecca; Francis, Alexander L.; Pediatrics, School of Medicine
    Despite early differences in orienting to sounds, no study to date has investigated whether children with ASD demonstrate impairments in attentional disengagement in the auditory modality. Twenty-one nine- to fifteen year old children with ASD and 20 age- and IQ-matched TD children were presented with an auditory gap-overlap paradigm. Evidence of impaired disengagement in ASD was mixed. Differences in saccadic reaction time for overlap and gap conditions did not differ between groups. However, children with ASD did show increased no-shift trials in the overlap condition, as well as reduced disengagement efficiency compared to their TD peers. These results provide further support for disengagement impairments in ASD, and suggest that these deficits include disengaging from and shifting to unimodal auditory information.