To hear out a conversation against other talkers listeners overcome energetic and informational masking. Largely attributed to top-down processes, information masking has also been demonstrated using unintelligible speech and amplitude-modulated maskers suggesting bottom-up processes. We examined the role of speech-like amplitude modulations in information masking using a spatial masking releas...

Health practitioners and researchers in behavioral medicine recognize the value of interventions aimed at promoting uptake and maintenance of health behavior to prevent chronic illness. Although there have been advances in interventions that promote health behavior change and their effectiveness, gaps in knowledge exist. In particular, the precise components or techniques of behavioral interven...

INTRODUCTION The expansion of the web is enormous and, more and more people every day access its content trying to make their life easier and their informational level complete. One can realize

Many of the items in the "Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of Hearing" scale questionnaire [S. Gatehouse and W. Noble, Int. J. Audiol. 43, 85-99 (2004)] are concerned with speech understanding in a variety of backgrounds, both speech and nonspeech. To study if this self-report data reflected informational masking, previously collected data on 414 people were analyzed. The lowest scores (greatest ...

How does one aim to understand neural information processing? One of the difficult first challenges is to identify the roles of the network's elements. To this end a functional contribution analysis (FCA) method has been developed and applied for studying the neurocontrollers of evolutionary autonomous agents (EAAs). The FCA processes data composed of multiple lesion experiments and the corresp...

Grounded on the ethical principle of respect for persons, parental permission and child assent function together to protect the child and to foster the development of the child's self-determination. Although both parental permission and child assent involve the same components of information sharing, comprehension, and voluntariness, how these three components are understood and operationalized...

The across-trial effect of maskers in conditions of informational masking was evaluated from performance on occasional trials in which the signal was presented alone. For 6 of 12 listeners participating in the study, a significant number of errors were obtained on signal-alone trials; in some cases equivalent to that signal+ masker trials. On immediately preceding trial blocks for which there w...

*Thanks are due to Hans Rott and Maurice Pagnucco who have commented on the July draft of this essay and who subsequently sent me a draft of their ideas on contraction. I have sought here to explain how I came to change my mind and favor mild contractions (or severe withdrawals as Rott and Pagnucco call such contractions) and to indicate some of the relations between the approach of Rott and Pa...

First-order languages of imperfect information (IF rst-order languages) have been introduced by Hintikka and Sandu 2]. These languages contained independent quantiiers and connectives of the form (9x=W); (8x=W); (_=W); (^=W) where W is a set of variables (x = 2 W), the values of which the quan-tiiers and the connectives on the left side of the slash are supposed to be independent of. The notion...