The cholinergic interneurons (CINs) of the striatum are crucial for normal motor and behavioral functions of the basal ganglia. Striatal CINs exhibit tonic firing punctuated by distinct pauses. Pauses occur in response to motivationally significant events, but their function is unknown. Here we investigated the effects of pauses in CIN firing on spiny projection neurons (SPNs) - the output neur...

This paper describes a method for automatically detecting filled (vocalized) pauses, which are one of the hesitation phenomena that current speech recognizers typically cannot handle. The detection of these pauses is important in spontaneous speech dialogue systems because they play valuable roles, such as helping a speaker keep a conversational turn, in oral communication. Although a few speec...

In this pilot study we investigated the temporal relationship between pauses and feedback. We found that the majority of feedback items occur in the proximity of trppauses (pauses that occur at a trp, within a speaker’s turn), but also that most intraturn pauses do not coincide with feedback units. This suggests that when modeling feedback in human-computer interaction, a method to identify trp...

The study investigated the natural work-pause pattern of computer users and the possible effects of imposing pause regimes on this pattern. Hereto, the precise timing of computer events was recorded across a large number of days. It was found that the distribution of the pause durations was extremely skewed and that pauses with twice the duration are twice less likely to occur. The effects of i...

Holds are defined as an active configured gestural state where no intended (hand) motion is perceived. We analyzed the audio and video from a cartoon story telling from memory, in order to determine the extent to which gestural holds overlap with speech phenomena such as empty and filled pauses. Data from two female participants are analyzed: an Italian and an American English-speaker, each usi...

In fast-growing bacteria, ribosomal RNA (rRNA) is required to be transcribed at very high rates to sustain the high cellular demand on ribosome synthesis. This results in dense traffic of RNA polymerases (RNAP). We developed a stochastic model, integrating results of single-molecule and quantitative in vivo studies of Escherichia coli, to evaluate the quantitative effect of pausing, termination...