Perception of speech is improved when presentation of the audio signal is accompanied by concordant visual speech gesture information. This enhancement is most prevalent when the audio signal is degraded. One potential means by which the brain affords perceptual enhancement is thought to be through the integration of concordant information from multiple sensory channels in a common site of conv...

We investigated the role of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors (mAChRs) in eyeblink serial feature-positive discrimination learning in mice using the mAChR antagonist. A 2-s light cue was delivered 5 or 6 s before the presentation of a 350-ms tone paired with a 100-ms periorbital electrical shock (cued trial) but not before the tone-alone presentation (non-cued trial). Mice received 30 cued and...

The content of visual working memory (VWM) guides attention, but whether this interaction is limited to a single VWM representation or functional for multiple VWM representations is under debate. To test this issue, we developed a gaze-contingent search paradigm to directly manipulate selection history and examine the competition between multiple cue-matching saccade target objects. Participant...

It is well known that lipreading or speechreading is a difficult and hazardous task for all deaf people, and all the more so for the small deaf child who has to acquire language from his parents' lips. Words with similar lip images, so-called "invisible" phonemes, and distortions induced by coarticulation are factors which make speechreading on its own unreliable, unfit to allow clear perceptio...

As part of our work on hand gesture interpretation, we present our results on hand shape recognition. Our method is based on attribute extraction and multiple binary SVM classification. The novelty lies in the fashion the fusion of all the partial classification results are performed. This fusion is (1) more efficient in terms of information theory and leads to more accurate result, (2) general...

A labeling test with synthetic speech stimuli was carried out to determine to what extent the two dimensions of fundamental frequency (F0), height and movement, and syllable duration provide cues to tonal distinctions in Taiwanese. The data show that the high level vs. mid level tones and the high falling vs. mid falling tones can be reliably distinguished by F0 height alone, whereas the distin...