By the use of ultrasound, chemical analysis and histologic techniques, the knowledge of embryo and fetal growth and developments is increasing steadily.  It has been demonstrated that the fetus can respond to sound, bright light and touch. Accordingly, works on fetal responses to external stimuli during the third trimester may ultimately lead to improve­ments in the techniques of antepartum fe...

The present study was performed to determine whether or not spontaneous K-complexes are induced by sensory stimuli. In the first part of the present study, sound stimuli were prescribed during sleep in 7 healthy, young, adult subjects. EEG segments in stage 2 sleep were averaged separately according to the presence or absence of an evoked K-complex appearing after each stimulus. The sound stimu...

Slow oscillations at frequencies <1 Hz manifest in many brain regions as discrete transitions between a depolarized up state and a hyperpolarized down state of the neuronal membrane potential. Although up and down states are known to differentially affect sensory-evoked responses, whether and how they are modulated by sensory stimuli are not well understood. In the present study, intracellular ...

The preservation of QoS for multimedia traffic through a data network is a difficult problem. We focus our attention on video frame rate and study its influence on speech perception. When sound and picture are discrepant (e.g., acoustic “ba” combined with visual “ga”), subjects perceive a different sound (such as “da”). This phenomenon is known as the McGurk effect. In this paper, the influence...

Pupillary dilation in response to sound stimuli is well established and is generally considered to represent a startle reflex to sound. We believe that the auditory-pupillary response represents not only a simple startle reflex to sound stimuli but also represents a reaction to stimulation of other sense organs, such as otolith organs. Eight young healthy volunteers without a history of hearing...

Temporally unpredictable stimuli influence murine and human behaviour, as previously demonstrated for sequences of simple sounds with regular or irregular onset. It is unknown whether this influence is mediated by an evaluation of the unpredictable sound sequences themselves, or by an interaction with task context. Here, we find that humans evaluate unrelated neutral pictures as more negative w...

When we change sidewalks because we see vomit or dog feces, we are avoiding disgusting stimuli. However, it is unclear how we shift spatial attention itself away from disgusting stimuli. In the present study, we used a multisensory spatial-cuing paradigm as a tool to test if a disgusting sound is avoided by redirecting visual attention to the opposite side. Our results show that behavioral resp...

Orienting our eyes to a light, a sound, or a touch occurs effortlessly, despite the fact that sound and touch have to be converted from head- and body-based coordinates to eye-based coordinates to do so. We asked whether the oculomotor representation is also used for localization of sounds even when there is no saccade to the sound source. To address this, we examined whether saccades introduce...

This study presents a method termed Audio Descriptive Analysis & Mapping (ADAM) to a study of spatial sound displays. Several subjective tasks were performed including a preference experiment, descriptive language development and lastly scaling of all stimuli based on developed attribute scales. The process associated with the descriptive language and attribute scale development is described in...

An occurring problem of the image-based-rendering technology for Virtual Environments has been that subjects in general showed very little movement of head and body. Our hypothesis is that the movement rate could be enhanced by introducing the auditory modality. In the study described in this paper, 126 subjects participated in a between-subjects experiment involving six different experimental ...