We investigated the influence of non-cued working memory representations on further information processing. A retro-cue indicated if items on the left or right side of a previous memory array remained relevant. Subsequently, a central probe item was presented with a varying stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA: 300, 400, 600, 1,000, 1,800 ms). Participants had to state whether this stimulus was shown...

Sense of agency refers to the subjective feeling of controlling events through one's behavior or will. Sense of agency results from matching predictions of one's own actions with actual feedback regarding the action. Furthermore, when an action involves a cued goal, performance-based inference contributes to sense of agency. That is, if people achieve their goal, they would believe themselves t...

It is widely recognized that, whatever educational method is utilized, whether oral or manual, the majority of profoundly deaf school leavers of today have not acquired adequate mastery of spoken and written language (Conrad, 1979). The cause for this unsatisfactory situation is often identified as the lack of adequate communication in the early period, reported to be the most favorable for lan...

Developmental dyslexia is associated with rhythmic difficulties, including impaired perception of beat patterns in music and prosodic stress patterns in speech. Spoken prosodic rhythm is cued by slow (<10 Hz) fluctuations in speech signal amplitude. Impaired neural oscillatory tracking of these slow amplitude modulation (AM) patterns is one plausible source of impaired rhythm tracking in dyslex...

Rhythm in music and speech can be characterized by a constellation of several acoustic cues. Individually, these cues have different effects on rhythmic perception: sequences of sounds alternating in duration are perceived as short-long pairs (weak-strong/iambic pattern), whereas sequences of sounds alternating in intensity or pitch are perceived as loud-soft, or high-low pairs (strong-weak/tro...

Prosodic structure provides an organization to spoken (and signed) language that signals the grouping of words into phrases, and the relative prominence of words and syllables (e.g., ShattuckHufnagel and Turk 1996). This organization is cued by articulatory and acoustic modifications to the signal. Different languages modulate different dimensions of the signal in different ways, but prosodic v...

This study replicated and extended previous data suggesting that worry inhibits emotional processing of fearful imagery. Female participants categorized as either victimization-fearful (N = 24) or victimization and speech-fearful (N = 27) completed trials of worrisome or relaxing thinking and tone-cued imagery. For each trial, participants engaged in 30 s of relaxing or worrisome (speech or vic...

Alterations of existing neural networks during healthy aging, resulting in behavioral deficits and changes in brain activity, have been described for cognitive, motor, and sensory functions. To investigate age-related changes in the neural circuitry underlying overt non-lexical speech production, functional MRI was performed in 14 healthy younger (21-32 years) and 14 healthy older individuals (...

Cued spatial attention modulates functionally relevant alpha rhythms in visual cortices in humans. Here, we present evidence for analogous phenomena in primary somatosensory neocortex (SI). Using magnetoencephalography, we measured changes in the SI mu rhythm containing mu-alpha (7-14 Hz) and mu-beta (15-29 Hz) components. We found that cued attention impacted mu-alpha in the somatopically loca...