In birds and higher mammals, auditory experience during development is critical to discriminate sound patterns in adulthood. However, the neural and molecular nature of this acquired ability remains elusive. In fruit flies, acoustic perception has been thought to be innate. Here we report, surprisingly, that auditory experience of a species-specific courtship song in developing Drosophila shape...

For marine mammals, auditory perception plays a critical role in a variety of acoustically mediated behaviors, such as communication, foraging, social interactions, and avoidance of predators. Although auditory perception involves many other factors beyond merely hearing or detecting sounds, sound detection is a required element for perception. As with many other processes, sound detection may ...

Singing requires effortless and efficient use of auditory and motor systems that center around the perception and production of the human voice. Although perception and production are usually tightly coupled functions, occasional mismatches between the two systems inform us of dissociable pathways in the brain systems that enable singing. Here I review the literature on perception and productio...

Previous research on the perception of foreign accent has largely focused on speaker-dependent factors such as Age of Learning and Length of Residence which are specific to an individual speaker. Factors that are independent of particular speakers and their language learning history have also been shown to affect perception of second language speech. The present study examined two speaker-indep...

Historic theories of speech perception (Motor Theory and Analysis by Synthesis) invoked listeners' knowledge of speech production to explain speech perception. Neuroimaging data show that adult listeners activate motor brain areas during speech perception. In two experiments using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we investigated motor brain activation, as well as auditory brain activation, during ...

Models of tinnitus suggest roles for auditory, attention, and emotional networks in tinnitus perception. A model of tinnitus audibility based on Helson's (1964) adaptation level theory (ALT) is hypothesized to explain the relationship between tinnitus audibility, personality, memory, and attention. This theory attempts to describe how tinnitus audibility or detectability might change with exper...

Early visual cortex receives non-feedforward input from lateral and top-down connections (Muckli & Petro 2013 Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 23, 195-201. (doi:10.1016/j.conb.2013.01.020)), including long-range projections from auditory areas. Early visual cortex can code for high-level auditory information, with neural patterns representing natural sound stimulation (Vetter et al. 2014 Curr. Biol. 24, ...

In humans, multisensory interaction is an important strategy for improving the detection of stimuli of different nature and reducing the variability of response. It is known that the presence of visual information affects the auditory perception in the horizontal plane (azimuth), but there are few researches that study the influence of vision in the auditory distance perception. In general, the...

For much of the past 50 years, the main theoretical debate in the scientific study of speech perception has focused on whether the processing of speech sounds relies on neural mechanisms that are specific to speech and language or whether general perceptual/cognitive processes can account for all of the relevant phenomena. Starting with the first presentations of the Motor Theory of Speech Perc...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES A deficit in phonological processing abilities has been hypothesized as a cause of reading deficits among poor readers, but the precise etiology of this deficit is still unknown. Many studies have investigated the relation of auditory processing and speech perception with phonological processing, while the relation between these are not well understood. Thus, the prese...