The generation of a behaviorally relevant cue to the speed of objects around us is critical to our ability to navigate safely within our environment. However, our perception of speed is often distorted by prevailing conditions. For instance, as luminance is reduced, our perception of the speed of fast moving ...

In human newborns, spontaneous visual preference for biological motion is reported to occur at birth, but the factors underpinning this preference are still in debate. Using a standard visual preferential looking paradigm, 4 experiments were carried out in 3-day-old human newborns to assess the influence of translational displacement on perception ...

OBJECTIVES: To characterize soft tissue vibrations during running with a preferred and a non-preferred strike pattern in shoes and barefoot. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. METHODS: Participants ran at 3.5ms(-1) on a treadmill in shoes and barefoot using a rearfoot and a forefoot strike for each footwear condition. The preferred strike patterns ...

Perceptual evaluation of electronically varied acoustic conditions has been perfomed with 15 musicians in a chamber orchestra rehearsal. Using Virtual Acoustics Technology (VAT), a room impulse response based active acoustic enhancement system, four different acoustic conditions were presented to the musicians. Condition 1 was the natural room itself without the ...

Consumer products can be perceived in many ways, and individual taste influences quality judgments. Sensory evaluation techniques have been developed to reveal detailed information about perception of products; recently, sensory evaluation has also been shown to be very useful in subjective evaluation of concert hall acoustics. In particular, individual vocabulary ...

In the primate visual system, area V4 is located in the ventral pathway and is traditionally thought to be involved in processing color and form information. However, little is known about its functional role in processing motion information. Using intrinsic signal optical imaging over large fields of view in V1, ...

Animal physiological and human psychophysical studies suggest that an early step in visual processing involves the detection and identification of features such as lines and edges, by neural mechanisms with even- and odd-symmetric receptive fields. Functional imaging studies also demonstrate mechanisms with even- and odd-receptive fields in early visual areas, ...

The main objective of this study was to analyse the effects of various landscape factors on soundscape perception in city parks. This was based on the experience, which was supposed to reflect soundscape perception, of 580 users of five city parks in Xiamen, China. Visual and functional landscape characteristics were ...

PURPOSE: To investigate the distribution of cone density and spacing as well as the preferred packing arrangement of the cone mosaic as a function of retinal eccentricity. METHODS: An adaptive optics retinal camera (rtx1, www.imagine-eyes.com) was used to obtain images of the parafoveal cone mosaic in nineteen healthy volunteers. Cone ...

ABSTRACT: The objective of this study was to compare drop (DJ) and hurdle jumps using a preferred, flat foot (FLAT) and fore foot (FORE) landing technique. Countermovement jump (CMJ) height was used to establish the hurdle and the DJ heights. Subjects performed forward hurdles and vertical DJs on a force ...

This study aimed to evaluate the taste and mouth feel of newly designed orally disintegrating tablets (ODTs) of pioglitazone, which is a typical type 2 diabetes medicine with an unpleasant taste, using a visual analogue scale (VAS) analysis. The ODTs were subjected to either of these 2 taste-masking procedures: a ...

Taste sensitivity is assessed with various techniques, including absolute detection and quality recognition. For any stimulus, one might expect individual differences in sensitivity to be reflected in all measures, but they are often surprisingly independent. Here, we focus on sensitivity to sour and salty taste, in part because processing of ...

Several studies have demonstrated that prestimulus occipital alpha-band activity substantially influences subjective perception and discrimination of near-threshold or masked visual stimuli. Here, we studied the role of prestimulus power fluctuations in two visual phenomena called double-flash illusion (DFI) and fusion effect (FE), both consisting of suprathreshold stimuli. In both phenomena, ...

Integration of bilateral sensory information is fundamental to stimulus localization in auditory systems and depth perception in vision, but the role of stereo olfactory cues remains obscure. Here it is shown that blind, eastern American moles combine serial sampling with bilateral nasal cues to localize odorants. Blocking one nostril causes ...

Background: Johnson and Dillon (2011) provided a model-based comparison of current generic hearing aid prescriptive methods for adults with hearing loss based on the attributes of speech intelligibility, loudness, and bandwidth. Purpose: This study compared the National Acoustic Laboratories-Non-linear 2 (NAL-NL2) and Cambridge Method for Loudness Equalization 2-High-Frequency (CAM2) prescriptive ...

The present study aimed to investigate whether side differences in olfactory bulb (OB) volume correlate to respective differences in olfactory function. In a total of 164 healthy volunteers volumetric measures of the OBs were performed plus lateralized measurements of odor thresholds and odor discrimination. Side differences were defined as 10% ...

Heroin addicts consume large quantities of refined sugars. This study investigated the effect of opiate use and antagonism on sweet taste in opiate-maintained drug users and detoxified former chronic opiate users, using a within-subject design.Seven opiate users received methadone and seven buprenorphine maintenance. Six detoxified subjects received naltrexone. Sucrose recognition ...

Nausea is associated with significant morbidity, and there is a wide range in the propensity of individuals to experience nausea. The neural basis of the heterogeneity in nausea susceptibility is poorly understood. Our previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in healthy adults showed that a visual motion stimulus caused ...

Thresholds for the perception of vibration on the hand reduce with increasing area of excitation when the thresholds are mediated by the Pacinian channel (a phenomenon known as spatial summation) but thresholds are generally independent of the area of excitation when they are mediated by non-Pacinian channels. The effect of ...

This study describes a novel myoelectric control scheme that is capable of motion rejection. As an extension of the commonly used linear discriminant analysis (LDA), this system generates a confidence score for each decision, providing the ability to reject those with a score below a selected threshold. The thresholds are ...

In the visual system of invertebrates and vertebrates there are specialised groups of motion-sensitive neurons, with large receptive fields, which are optimally tuned to respond to optic flow produced by the animals' movement through the 3-D world. From their response characteristics, shared frame of reference with the vestibular or inertial ...

There is an ongoing debate about the reasons underlying gait transition in terrestrial locomotion. In bipedal locomotion, the 'compass gait', a reductionist model of inverted pendulum walking, predicts the boundaries of speed and step length within which walking is feasible. The stance of the compass gait is energetically optimal-at walking ...

Several models of heading detection during smooth pursuit rely on the assumption of local constraint line tuning to exist in large scale motion detection templates. A motion detector that exhibits pure constraint line tuning responds maximally to any 2D-velocity in the set of vectors that can be decomposed into the ...

The tropical root weevil Diaprepes abbreviatus is a major pest of multiple crops in the Caribbean Islands and has become a serious constraint to citrus production in the United States. Recent work has identified host and conspecific volatiles that mediate host- and mate-finding by D. abbreviatus. The interaction of light, ...

Human observers are extremely adept at correctly interpreting the visual input that they receive despite its inherent ambiguity. There are, however, situations in which no single, valid interpretation exists and perception oscillates. Such situations offer insight into the processes underlying perception, as they reveal the conditions under which our percept ...

Arousal has long been known to influence behavior and serves as an underlying component of cognition and consciousness. However, the consequences of hyper-arousal for visual perception remain unclear. The present study evaluates the impact of hyper-arousal on two aspects of visual sensitivity: visual stereoacuity and contrast thresholds. Sixty-eight participants participated ...

Limited information is available regarding the habitat preference of the Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops aduncus) in South Australian estuarine environments. The need to overcome this paucity of information is crucial for management and conservation initiatives. This preliminary study investigates the space-time patterns of habitat preference by the Indo-Pacific bottlenose ...

The punt kick is important in many football codes and support leg kinematics and ground reaction forces have been implicated in injury and performance in kicking. OBJECTIVES: To evaluate ground reaction forces and support leg kinematics in the punt kick. DESIGN: Cross sectional study. METHODS: Seven elite Australian football players ...

This study provides additional evidence for the positive effect of the presence of a quiet façade at a dwelling and aims at unraveling potential mechanisms. Locations with dominant road traffic noise and high L(den)-levels at the most exposed façade were selected. Dwellings both with and without a quiet façade were ...

Certain consonant/vowel (CV) combinations are more frequent than would be expected from the individual C and V frequencies alone, both in babbling and, to a lesser extent, in adult language, based on dictionary counts: Labial consonants co-occur with central vowels more often than chance would dictate; coronals co-occur with front ...

MT+and V6 are key motion areas of the dorsal visual stream in both macaque and human brain. In the present study, we combined electrophysiological and neuroimaging methods (including retinotopic brain mapping) to find the electrophysiological correlates of V6 and to define its temporal relationship with the activity observed in MT+. ...

Much of our science and technology relies on the visualization of complex data, and chemical biology, more than most fields, often deals with complex datasets. There are, however, other ways of making information available to our senses beyond the visual. Rare individuals naturally have sensory crossover, whose synesthesia permits them, ...

In vision, two mixtures, each containing an independent set of many different wavelengths, may produce a common color percept termed "white." In audition, two mixtures, each containing an independent set of many different frequencies, may produce a common perceptual hum termed "white noise." Visual and auditory whites emerge upon two ...

Increased sensitivity to specific cues in the environment is common in anxiety disorders. This increase in sensory processing can emerge through attention processes that enhance discrimination of a cue from other cues as well as through augmented senses that reduce the absolute intensity of sensory stimulation needed for detection. Whereas ...

This article reviews a series of studies on the factors influencing sound quality preferences, mostly for jazz and classical music stimuli. The data were obtained using ratings of individual stimuli or using the method of paired comparisons. For normal-hearing participants, the highest ratings of sound quality were obtained when the ...

This study quantified relationships between USDA instrument marbling measurements and LM sensory attributes (tenderness, flavor, juiciness) and shear force. Heifer (n = 390) and steer (n = 328) carcasses (all A-maturity) were selected at 4 beef processing plants in CO, KS, NE, and TX to represent 7 marbling degrees: Traces ...

Some combinations of musical notes sound pleasing and are termed "consonant," but others sound unpleasant and are termed "dissonant." The distinction between consonance and dissonance plays a central role in Western music, and its origins have posed one of the oldest and most debated problems in perception. In modern times, ...

BackgroundFlickering light has been shown to sensitize the migraine visual system at high stimulus contrast while elevating thresholds at low contrast. The present study employs a dichoptic psychophysical paradigm to ask whether the abnormal adaptation to flicker in migraine occurs before or after the binocular combination of inputs from the ...

ABSTRACT Neuroprosthetic limbs, regardless of their sophisticated motor control, require sensory feedback to viably interact with the environment. Toward that aim, the authors examined interrelationships between tactile and proprioceptive sensations. Through human psychophysics experiments, they evaluated error patterns of subjects estimating hand location in a horizontal 2-dimensional workspace under 3 ...

Subjective evaluation of acoustics was studied by recording nine concert halls with a simulated symphony orchestra on a seat 12 m from the orchestra. The recorded music was spatially reproduced for subjective listening tests and individual vocabulary profiling. In addition, the preferences of the assessors and objective parameters were gathered. The ...

Crossmodal correspondences between odors and visual stimuli-particularly colors-are well-established in the literature, but there is a paucity of research involving visual shape correspondences. Crossmodal associations between 20 odors (a selection of those commonly found in wine) and visual shape stimuli ("kiki"/"bouba" forms-Köhler W. 1929. Gestalt psychology. New York: Liveright.) were ...

Photoallodynia (photophobia) occurs when normal levels of light cause pain ranging from uncomfortable to debilitating. The only current treatment for photoallodynia is light avoidance. The first step to understanding the mechanisms of photoallodynia is to develop reliable animal behavioral tests of light aversion and identify the photoreceptors required to initiate ...

  2,5-Dimethyl-3-methoxypyrazine (DMMP) has been recently identified in both Coccinellidae-tainted (by either Coccinella septempunctata or Harmonia axyridis beetles) and untainted wines; however, little is known regarding its impact on wine aroma and flavor. The aims of this study were to obtain an accurate estimate of both the ortho- and retronasal ...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS: Our goal was to assess the impact of personal music players, earphones, and music styles on output, the subject's preferred listening levels, and outline recommendations for the prevention of music-induced hearing loss. STUDY DESIGN: Experimental study. Personal music players' output capabilities and volunteers' preferred output levels were assessed in ...

The dependence of the confinement transition parameters on the fermion content provides information on the mechanism of confinement. Recent progress in lattice gauge theories has allowed us to study it for a light flavor number N_{f}∼O(10) and found this transition to shift toward significantly stronger coupling. We propose an explanation ...

This study aims to evaluate how speech quality is affected by noise which varies in modulation from 0% (the lowest correlation with the speech envelope) to 100% (the highest correlation with the speech envelope). Using a scaled paired-comparison forced-choice procedure, ten normal-hearing listeners rated overall preference, noisiness, and distortion of ...

Both mimicking and being mimicked induces preference for a target. The present experiments investigate the minimal sufficient conditions for this mimicry-preference link to occur. We argue that mere effector matching between one's own and the other person's movement is sufficient to induce preference, independent of which movement is actually performed. ...

An open problem in acoustical psychophysics involves the extent to which the structuro-acoustical properties of a set of sounds determine goodness of pattern judgments (i.e., how good a pattern is perceived to be). We investigated this question experimentally and theoretically from the standpoint of the dimensional structure of sets of ...

Previous work has shown that perception of allophones of /p/ in English utterances was influenced by lexical status. In nonwords, the aspirated allophone was preferred whether appropriate or not; in words, the appropriate allophone was preferred [Whalen, Best, & Irwin (1997), J. Phonetics, 25, 501-528]. Here, we examined dark and ...

PURPOSE.: Monocular estimation method (MEM) dynamic retinoscopy and low neutral (LN) dynamic retinoscopy are common procedures for evaluating the need for near-point plus adds for improved near-point performance in non-presbyopes. A combination of MEM and LN has been suggested to be a method of plotting accommodative response/accommodative stimulus functions and ...