The precedence effect (PE) is an auditory phenomenon involved in suppressing the perception of echoes in reverberant environments, and is thought to facilitate accurate localization of sound sources. We investigated physiological correlates of the PE in the inferior colliculus (IC) of anesthetized cats, with a focus on directional mechanisms for this phenomenon. We used a virtual space (VS) tec...

The present study was designed to investigate whether the rat posterior parietal cortex is involved in the perception and the representation of the auditory space. We recorded single neural activity in the posterior parietal cortex of rats that performed a directional delayed nonmatching-to-sample task. In the task, cue tones were presented in one of six speakers that were placed symmetrically ...

In speech perception, phonetic information can be acquired optically as well as acoustically. The motor theory of speech perception holds that motor control structures are involved in the processing of visible speech, whereas perceptual accounts do not make this assumption. Motor involvement in speech perception was examined by showing participants response-irrelevant movies of a mouth articula...

The head-related transfer function (HRTF) describes the individual perception of sound for different angles of incidence of a sound wave. The directional cues contained in the HRTF are introduced by reflection and diffraction of the sound wave at head and torso and are highly individual [1]. When hearing a binaural signal synthesized via a generic HRTF – deviating from the listener’s HRTF – loc...

When two taste stimuli are presented, one to each side of the tongue, with a time delay of up to 1 msec., the taste sensation seems to move across the tongue. This phenomenon which is similar to directional hearing, can be used to show periodic fluctuations in sensation magnitude as well as other aspects of sensation. When the apparatus was refined to present taste stimuli, it was possible to o...

The aim of this letter is to address a little understood question in sound source localization: Can the distance of a near sound source affect our own perception of its elevation? The issue is studied by means of an objective analysis of a database of distance-dependent head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) of a KEMAR (Knowles Electronic Manikin for Acoustic Research) mannequin with different...

There are examples of robotic systems in which autonomous mobile robots self-assemble into larger connected entities. However, existing systems display little or no autonomous control over the shape of the connected entity thus formed. We describe a novel distributed mechanism that allows autonomous mobile robots to self-assemble into pre-specified patterns. Global patterns are ‘grown’ using lo...

In concert hall acoustics, the spatial character of a sound field has been understood as important for quite some time. Reichardt and Schmidt performed initial studies on the perception of directional reflections and reverberation1. Identifying lateral reflections as important, Reichardt and Lehmann proposed a metric, Room Impression Index (R), to predict subjective room impression, mainly in t...

Processing passengers quickly and efficiently is one of the top goals for airport administrators, and major international gateways have the added challenge of processing passengers representing a variety of cultures and nations. People with diverse cultural backgrounds may interpret signage layouts differently with respect to symbols and text. Consequently, dedicated research into signage perce...

directional simulation, among techniques for reliability analysis of engineering structures, is well known. in this context, directional simulation in load space, because of the considerable advantages of lower dimension of working space, is of considerable interest. as is expected due to structural resistance variability, the location of the relevant limit state(s) is no longer constant and mu...