Autism has been associated with abnormalities in sensory and attentional processing. Here, we assessed these processes independently in the visual and auditory domains using a visual contrast-discrimination task and an auditory modulation-depth discrimination task. To evaluate changes in sensory function by attention, we measured behavioral performance (discrimination accuracy) when subjects we...

The diffusion decision model (Ratcliff, 1978) was used to examine discrimination for a range of perceptual tasks: numerosity discrimination, number discrimination, brightness discrimination, motion discrimination, speed discrimination, and length discrimination. The model produces a measure of the quality of the information that drives decision processes, a measure termed drift rate in the mode...

BACKGROUND Absolute pitch (AP) is the ability to identify or produce isolated musical tones. It is evident primarily among individuals who started music lessons in early childhood. Because AP requires memory for specific pitches as well as learned associations with verbal labels (i.e., note names), it represents a unique opportunity to study interactions in memory between linguistic and nonling...

In order to test the frequent assumption that lexical access in visual word recognition would proceed independent of central attention, the overlapping task paradigm has recently been employed with somewhat contradictory results. Here we combined overlapping tasks with the recording of event-related brain potentials to assess task load dependent modulations of lexical access in more detail. The...

This paper proposes an improved query by singing/humming (QBSH) system using both melody and lyrics information for achieving better performance. Singing/humming discrimination (SHD) is first performed to distinguish singing from humming queries. For a humming query, we apply a pitch-only melody recognition method that has been used for QBSH task at MIREX with rank-1 performance. For a singing ...

Absolute pitch (AP) is the rare ability of musicians to identify the pitch of tonal sound without external reference. While there have been behavioral and neuroimaging studies on the characteristics of AP, how the AP is implemented in human brains remains largely unknown. AP can be viewed as comprising of two subprocesses: perceptual (processing auditory input to extract a pitch chroma) and ass...

Musical pitch identification was investigated in two experiments in which absolute pitch (AP) possessors and nonpossessors categorized tones presented in isolation into predetermined pitch classes. Stimuli consisted of 60 different tones per octave (at intervals of 20 cents). The experiments were designed to minimize the possibility that subjects could use strategies other than AP in perfi~rmin...

Emotion discrimination, emotion regulation, and cognitive control are three related, yet separable processes that emerge over the course of development. The current study tested 100 children, adolescents, and adults on an Emotional Go/Nogo task, illustrating the ability of this paradigm to identify the unique developmental patterns for each of these three processes in the context of both positi...

Different groups of adult rats were subjected to discrete lesions in one of ten different areas of the brain which have previously been found to be implicated in retention of learned brightness and pattern discrimination habits. When tested for the rodent's predictable (instinctive) preference for the dark, eight groups showed deficient preference scores and two showed preference scores compara...