A compelling example of auditory-visual multisensory integration is the McGurk effect, in which an auditory syllable is perceived very differently depending on whether it is accompanied by a visual movie of a speaker pronouncing the same syllable or a different, incongruent syllable. Anatomical and physiological studies in human and nonhuman primates have suggested that the superior temporal su...

“The Mozart effect” originally referred to the phenomenon of a brief enhancement of spatial-temporal abilities in college students after listening to a Mozart piano sonata (K. 448). Over time, this term was conflated with an independent series of studies on the effects of music instruction. This occurrence has caused confusion that has been perpetuated in scholarly articles, such as the one by ...

In the present study, we demonstrate an audiotactile effect in which amplitude modulation of auditory feedback during voiced speech induces a throbbing sensation over the lip and laryngeal regions. Control tasks coupled with the examination of speech acoustic parameters allow us to rule out the possibility that the effect may have been due to cognitive factors or motor compensatory effects. We ...

BACKGROUND The involuntary capture of attention by pain may, to some extent, be controlled by psychological variables. In this paper, we investigated the effect of attentional set (i.e., the collection of task-related features that a person is monitoring in order to successfully pursue a goal) on pain. METHODS Two experiments are reported in which the task relevance of the modality and spatia...

Auditory scene analysis is a demanding computational process that is performed automatically and efficiently by the healthy brain but vulnerable to the neurodegenerative pathology of Alzheimer's disease. Here we assessed the functional neuroanatomy of auditory scene analysis in Alzheimer's disease using the well-known 'cocktail party effect' as a model paradigm whereby stored templates for audi...

We examined the processing of potential auditory and visual cues that differentiate statements from echoic questions. In Experiment 1, four natural speech statement-question pairs were identified by participants, and then analyzed to determine which characteristics were ecologically valid. These characteristics were tested in subsequent experiments to determine if they were also functionally va...