background aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans and tannerella forsythensis are two major pathogens in destructive periodontal disease in humans. the detection of these bacteria is needed for diagnosis and management of the mentioned diseases. objectives we aimed to develop and compare improved multiplex conventional and sybr green real time pcr assays for a specific diagnosis of the organisms...

To form perceptual decisions in our multisensory environment, the brain needs to integrate sensory information derived from a common source and segregate information emanating from different sources. Combining fMRI and psychophysics in humans, we investigated how the brain accumulates sensory evidence about a visual source in the context of congruent or conflicting auditory information. In a vi...

Objectives: This study investigated the efficacy of working memory training for improving working memory capacity and related auditory stream segregation in auditory processing disorders children. Methods: Fifteen subjects (9-11 years), clinically diagnosed with auditory processing disorder participated in this non-randomized case-controlled trial. Working memory abilities and auditory strea...

OBJECTIVE This clinical trial investigated the ability of concurrent speech segregation in hearing impaired children. The auditory behavioral responses and auditory late responses (ALRs) were compared between test and control groups prior to vowel auditory training and after 3 and 6 months of vowel auditory training to find the effects of bottom-up training on concurrent speech segregation in h...

This paper demonstrates that a low-level, linear description of the response properties of auditory neurons can exhibit some of the high-level properties of the categorical perception of human speech. In particular, it is shown that the non-linearities observed in the human perception of speech sounds which span a categorical boundaries can be understood as arising rather naturally from a low-l...

After several years of exposure to musical instrument practice, musicians acquire a great expertise in processing auditory features like tonal pitch or timbre. Here we compared the performance of musicians and non-musicians in two timbre discrimination tasks: one using instrumental timbres, the other using voices. Both accuracy (d-prime) and reaction time measures were obtained. The results ind...

Successful speech communication often requires selective attention to a target stream amidst competing sounds, as well as the ability to switch attention among multiple interlocutors. However, auditory attention switching negatively affects both target detection accuracy and reaction time, suggesting that attention switches carry a cognitive cost. Pupillometry is one method of assessing mental ...

BACKGROUND Turning-while-walking is one of the commonest causes of falls in stroke survivors. It involves cognitive processing and may be challenging when performed concurrently with a cognitive task. Previous studies of dual-tasking involving turning-while-walking in stroke survivors show that the performance of physical tasks is compromised. However, the design of those studies did not addres...

Auditory icons – caricatures of everyday sounds – have the potential to convey information by non-verbal means quickly and accurately. Two experiments investigated the application of auditory icons as warning signals to the civil aviation cockpit environment. Warning signals that are iconic and that stand in a direct relation to the event being signalled, such as the sound of coughing to signal...