I was pleased to be asked to visit a remote, beautiful, verdant, and earthy location to give the symposium lecture at a conference on something researchers rarely discuss as such: the sensory aspect of working memory. Is there such a thing? Why is it rarely referred to in this way? First I will discuss terms and what they mean, with a short modern history of the usage of these terms and a gener...

Embedded in everyday practices, food can be a rich resource for interaction design. This article focuses on eating experiences to uncover how bodily, sensory, and socio-cultural aspects of better leveraged the design user experience. We report systematic literature review 109 papers, interviews with 18 professional chefs, providing new understandings prior HFI research, as well chefs creatively...

The notion that exposure to a monotonous sensory environment could elicit reports indicating aberrant subjective experience and altered time perception is the impetus for the present report. Research has looked at the influence of exposure to such environments on time perception, reporting that the greater the environmental variation, the shorter is the time estimation obtained by the method of...

Disentangling the effects of sensory and cognitive factors on neural reorganization is fundamental for establishing the relationship between plasticity and functional specialization. Auditory deprivation in humans provides a unique insight into this problem, because the origin of the anatomical and functional changes observed in deaf individuals is not only sensory, but also cognitive, owing to...

A recent experiment suggests that neural circuits may alternatively implement continuous or discrete attractors, depending on the training set up. In recurrent neural network models, continuous and discrete attractors are separately modeled by distinct forms of synaptic prescriptions (learning rules). Here, we report a solvable network model, endowed with Hebbian synaptic plasticity, which is a...

We tested the involvement of cognition in adult experience-dependent neuroplasticity using primate cortical implants. In a prior study, learning an operant sensory discrimination increased cortical excitability and target selectivity. Here, the prior task was separated into three behavioral phases. First, naive animals were exposed to stimulus-reward pairings from the prior study. These yoked a...

Sensory and environmental manipulations affect the development of sensory systems. Higher-order auditory representations (auditory categories or "objects") evolve with experience and via top-down influences modify representations in early auditory areas. During development of a functional auditory system, the capacity for bottom-up reorganizations is successively less well expressed due to a mo...

Sensory experience and learning alter sensory representations in cerebral cortex. The synaptic mechanisms underlying sensory cortical plasticity have long been sought. Recent work indicates that long-term cortical plasticity is a complex, multicomponent process involving multiple synaptic and cellular mechanisms. Sensory use, disuse, and training drive long-term potentiation and depression (LTP...

Using a visual-to-auditory sensory-substitution algorithm, congenitally fully blind adults were taught to read and recognize complex images using "soundscapes"--sounds topographically representing images. fMRI was used to examine key questions regarding the visual word form area (VWFA): its selectivity for letters over other visual categories without visual experience, its feature tolerance for...

A growing body of work suggests that sensory processes may also contribute to affective experience. In this study, we performed a meta-analysis of affective experiences driven through visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and somatosensory stimulus modalities including study contrasts that compared affective stimuli to matched neutral control stimuli. We found, first, that limbic and paralimb...