Animals require the ability to ignore sensory stimuli that have no consequence yet respond to the same stimuli when they become useful. However, the brain circuits that govern this flexibility in sensory processing are not well understood. Here we show in mouse primary auditory cortex (A1) that daily passive sound exposure causes a long-lasting reduction in representations of the experienced so...

Sound localization is an important function of the human brain, but the underlying cortical mechanisms remain unclear. In this study, we recorded auditory stimuli in three-dimensional space and then replayed the stimuli through earphones during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). By employing a machine learning algorithm, we successfully decoded sound location from the blood oxygenati...

The cortical mechanisms underlying echoic memory and change detection were investigated using an auditory change-related component (N100c) of event-related brain potentials. N100c was elicited by paired sound stimuli, a standard followed by a deviant, while subjects watched a silent movie. The amplitude of N100c elicited by a fixed sound pressure deviance (70 dB vs. 75 dB) was negatively correl...

The abilities of animals and humans to extract rules from sound sequences have previously been compared using observation of spontaneous responses and conditioning techniques. However, the results were inconsistently interpreted across studies possibly due to methodological and/or species differences. Therefore, we examined the strategies for discrimination of sound sequences in Bengalese finch...

Patients with head injuries frequently complain of a decreased ability to endure intense light and sound stimuli. The few psychophysical studies that have objectively studied this type of hyperaesthesia have not assessed to what extent patients recover from this hyperaesthesia after mild head injury (MHI). A computerised rating technique was used to assess tolerance to intense sound (95 dB) and...

which the brain is less responsive to external stimuli. We are functionally blind during sleep with no response to visual stimuli and a decreased threshold of response to auditory stimuli. Babies have been exposed to sound of up to 100 dB, which is above the legal limit for ear protection for employees, without waking up. In adults, the process is selective demonstrating continuing cortical fun...

Although vision is considered the dominant modality, recent studies demonstrate the influence of other modalities on visual perception. For example, in the sound-induced flash illusion, two auditory stimuli cause one visual flash to be perceived as two. We report an extension of the sound-induced flash illusion to the tactile-visual domain, yielding the touch-induced flash illusion. Observers r...

BACKGROUND Vestibular evoked myogenic potential (VEMP) is one of the clinical tools to evaluate vestibular function. The VEMP can be recorded from sternocleidomastoid muscle by auditory stimulation with various sound stimuli. The aim of this study was to compare the VEMP responses evoked by short tone burst (STB) with those evoked by click stimuli in healthy young individuals. METHODS Twenty-...

Cross-language differences in speech perception have traditionally been linked to phonological categories, but it has become increasingly clear that language experience has effects beginning at early stages of perception, which blurs the accepted distinctions between general and speech-specific processing. The present experiments explored this distinction by playing stimuli to English and Japan...

Crossmodal music-to-color correspondences are mediated by emotion for classical music (Palmer et al., 2013) and diverse other genres. People tend to choose colors as going best with music when both have similar emotional associations (e.g., happy-looking colors go best with happy-sounding music). Lower level musical stimuli, including single-line melodies, two-note intervals, and instrumental t...