Although auditory cortex is thought to play an important role in processing complex natural sounds such as speech and animal vocalizations, the specific functional roles of cortical receptive fields (RFs) remain unclear. Here, we study the relationship between a behaviorally important function: the discrimination of natural sounds and the structure of cortical RFs. We examine this problem in th...

Saccade curvature represents a sensitive measure of oculomotor inhibition with saccades curving away from covertly attended locations. Here we investigated whether and how saccade curvature depends on movement preparation time when a perceptual task is performed during or before saccade preparation. Participants performed a dual-task including a visual discrimination task at a cued location and...

We examined the effects of emotional stimuli on right and left hemisphere detection performance in a hemifield visual discrimination task. A group of 18 healthy subjects were asked to discriminate between upright and inverted triangles (target). Targets were randomly presented in the left or right visual hemifield (150 ms target duration). A brief emotional picture (pleasant or unpleasant; 150 ...

Previous evidence that repetition of an item in a list enhances that item's recency relative to other items has been interpreted as favoring a memory strength theory of recency discrimination. However, serious doubt has been cast upon the validity of the strength theory by experiments such as that of Hintzman and Block, which instead favor a multitrace representation for repetitions of an item....

Visual spatial attention can be exogenously captured by a salient stimulus or can be endogenously allocated by voluntary effort. Whether these two attention modes serve distinctive functions is debated, but for processing of single targets the literature suggests superiority of exogenous attention (it is faster acting and serves more functions). We report that endogenous attention uniquely cont...

Discrimination might be considered unjust on account of the comparative disadvantage it imposes, the absolute advantage it imposes, the disrespect it shows, or the prejudice it shows. This article argues that each of these accounts overlooks some cases of unjust discrimination. In response to this state of affairs we might combine two or more of these accounts. A promising approach combines the...

Previous studies have reported two types of event-related potential (ERP) mismatch responses in infants to infrequent auditory changes: a broad discriminative positivity in younger infants and a negativity resembling adult mismatch negativity (MMN) in older infants. In the present study, we investigated whether the positive discriminative slow wave and the adult-like MMN are functionally distin...

The decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union to ban sex discrimination in insurance has shown the potential reach of the principle of non-discrimination. This paper discusses the different positions taken by participants in the policy process leading up to the decision, in order to reveal the potential and limitations of nondiscrimination as the basis for market-regulatory social ...