When the subject occasionally emitted an invisibly small thumb twitch (detected electromyographically), he received a tone as a signal to press a key. After several conditioning sessions, the tone was progressively diminished to zero. The subject nevertheless continued to press the key whenever he emitted a thumb twitch, and he reported that he still heard the tone.

Previous studies have shown improved sensitivity to native-language contrasts and reduced sensitivity to non-native phonetic contrasts when comparing 6-8 and 10-12-month-old infants. This developmental pattern is interpreted as reflecting the onset of language-specific processing around the first birthday. However, generalization of this finding is limited by the fact that studies have yielded ...

Phonological skills are enhanced by music training, but the mechanisms enabling this cross-domain enhancement remain unknown. To explain this cross-domain transfer, we propose a precise auditory timing hypothesis (PATH) whereby entrainment practice is the core mechanism underlying enhanced phonological abilities in musicians. Both rhythmic synchronization and language skills such as consonant d...

'Stimulus roving' refers to a paradigm in which the properties of the stimuli to be discriminated vary from trial to trial, rather than being kept constant throughout a block of trials. Rhesus monkeys have previously been shown to improve their contrast discrimination performance on a non-roving task, in which they had to report the contrast of a test stimulus relative to that of a fixed-contra...

This study examined the musical processing in a professional musician who suffered from amusia after a left temporo-parietal stroke. The patient showed preserved metric judgement and normal performance in all aspects of melodic processing. By contrast, he lost the ability to discriminate or reproduce rhythms. Arrhythmia was only observed in the auditory modality: discrimination of auditorily pr...

Errors in choice tasks have been shown to elicit a cascade of characteristic components in the human event-related potential (ERPs)-the error-related negativity (Ne/ERN) and the error positivity (Pe). Despite the large number of studies concerned with these components, it is still unclear how they relate to error awareness as measured by overt error signaling responses. In the present study, we...

The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 confers limited but significant rights on people with disabilities in the United Kingdom. In this article we focus on the protection that the Act offers to people with epilepsy in the sphere of employment. We examine the exempt categories of employment and the extent to which epilepsy qualifies as a disability for statutory purposes. We go on to explore th...

non-somatic causes of pain may aggravate painful complaints and complicate the conservative management of diseases such as lumbo-sacral disk root disease. the two-point discrimination test has been used for assessment of diseases, which change patients' skin sensation. this study aims to find out how applicable is two-point discrimination test in the conservative treatment of lumbo-sacral disk ...

This report introduces a new corpus of music, speech, and noise. This dataset is suitable for training models for voice activity detection (VAD) and music/speech discrimination. Our corpus is released under a flexible Creative Commons license. The dataset consists of music from several genres, speech from twelve languages, and a wide assortment of technical and non-technical noises. We demonstr...

Amblyopes and nonamblyopes were compared on 2 tests of spatial perception. One, the Titmus stereotest, provided only disparity cues and thus measured pure stereopsis. The other, the 3-rods test, provided a variety of monocular and binocular cues and measured the precision of distance discrimination. On both tests the amblyopes were significantly worse than nonamblyopes with equivalent acuity de...