The study of song learning and the neural song system has provided an important comparative model system for the study of speech and language acquisition. We describe some recent advances in the bird song system, focusing on the role of off-line processing including sleep in processing sensory information and in guiding developmental song learning. These observations motivate a new model of the...

Mechanisms underlying the binocular combination of visual information were investigated within the context of a visual information acquisition theory proposed by Loftus, Busey, and their colleagues (e.g., as described by T.A. Busey & G. R. Loftus, 1994). A central assumption of the theory is that of a sensory threshold, which engenders an information loss such that information processing subseq...

Efference copy signals are used to reduce cognitive load by decreasing sensory processing of reafferent information (those incoming sensory signals that are produced by an organism's own motor output). Attenuated sensory processing of self-generated afferents is seen across species and in multiple sensory systems involving many different neural structures and circuits including both cortical an...

Working memory (WM) involves maintaining information in an on-line state. One emerging view is that information in WM is maintained via sensory recruitment, such that information is stored via sustained activity in the sensory areas that encode the to-be-remembered information. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we observed that key sensory regions such as primary visual cortex (V1) s...

evolution of sensory systems is driven by the d reproducein a naturalistic sensory envineural architectures are also shaped by constraints These constraints include the lopm.. e.... ntal constraints that restrict the posmutations as well as stochastic developmental systerms are further limited by metabolic costs, e cost of maintaining ionic gradients. Finally, limited by the propertiesof their ...

Human information processing is limited by attentional resources. That is, via attentional mechanisms, humans select a limited amount of sensory input to process while other sensory input is neglected. In multisensory research, a matter of ongoing debate is whether there are distinct pools of attentional resources for each sensory modality or whether attentional resources are shared across sens...