It is an honor and privilege to address you as president of the American Society for Clinical Investigation. For more than 100 years, this organization has represented the best of physician-scientists. Since it is now 2012, there is the possibility that this could be the last ASCI presidential address. But we will assume the Mayans miscalculated and that we should look to the future. With the A...

The amusement expression is both visual and audible in speech. After recording comparable spontaneous, acted, mechanical, reiterated and seduction stimuli, five perceptual experiments were held, mainly based on the hypothesis of prosodically controlled effects of amusement on speech. Results show that audio is partially independant from video, which is as performant as audio-video. Spontaneous ...

Memes are the fundamental unit of cultural evolution and have been left upon the periphery of cognitive neuroscience due to their inexact definition and the consequent presumption that they are impossible to measure. Here it is argued that although a precise definition of memes is rather difficult it does not preclude highly controlled experiments studying the neural substrates of their initiat...

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the visual modality is useful for the perception of prosody. An audiovisual corpus consisting of four focus conditions (subject, verb, object focus and broad focus) was recorded from a male native speaker of French. A preliminary production study showed that there are visible correlates of contrastive focus in French a) increase in lip area and...

Can we believe what we read? As practitioners and researchers we trust in good faith that the information presented within our professional journals is a true and accurate representation of the authors' work; be it a substantive review of the literature on a particular area, or the use of previous research to support the clinical findings of an interesting case. As authors, we are responsible f...

The evidence is mixed as to whether the visual system treats objects and holes differently. We used a multiple object tracking task to test the hypothesis that figural objects are easier to track than holes. Observers tracked four of eight items (holes or objects). We used an adaptive algorithm to estimate the speed allowing 75% tracking accuracy. In Experiments 1-5, the distinction between hol...