Search results for "ACOUSTIC"
showing 10 items of 1590 documents
The Effect of Adaptive Nonlinear Frequency Compression on Phoneme Perception
2017
Purpose This study implemented a fitting method, developed for use with frequency lowering hearing aids, across multiple testing sites, participants, and hearing aid conditions to evaluate speech perception with a novel type of frequency lowering. Method A total of 8 participants, including children and young adults, participated in real-world hearing aid trials. A blinded crossover design, including posttrial withdrawal testing, was used to assess aided phoneme perception. The hearing aid conditions included adaptive nonlinear frequency compression (NFC), static NFC, and conventional processing. Results Enabling either adaptive NFC or static NFC improved group-level detection and recognit…
The auditory N1 suppression rebounds as prediction persists over time
2016
International audience; The predictive coding model of perception proposes that neuronal responses reflect prediction errors. Repeated as well as predicted stimuli trigger suppressed neuronal responses because they are associated with reduced prediction errors. However, many predictable events in our environment are not isolated but sequential, yet there is little empirical evidence documenting how suppressed neuronal responses reflecting reduced prediction errors change in the course of a predictable sequence of events. Here we conceived an auditory electroencephalography (EEG) experiment where prediction persists over series of four tones to allow for the delineation of the dynamics of th…
The feeling of familiarity for music in patients with a unilateral temporal lobe lesion: A gating study
2015
International audience; Previous research has indicated that the medial temporal lobe (MTL), and more specifically the perirhinal cortex, plays a role in the feeling of familiarity for non-musical stimuli. Here, we examined contribution of the MTL to the feeling of familiarity for music by testing patients with unilateral MTL lesions. We used a gating paradigm: segments of familiar and unfamiliar musical excerpts were played with increasing durations (250, 500, 1000, 2000, 4000 ms and complete excerpts), and participants provided familiarity judgments for each segment. Based on the hypothesis that patients might need longer segments than healthy controls (HC) to identify excerpts as familia…
Speech- and sound-segmentation in dyslexia: evidence for a multiple-level cortical impairment
2006
Developmental dyslexia involves deficits in the visual and auditory domains, but is primarily characterized by an inability to translate the written linguistic code to the sound structure. Recent research has shown that auditory dysfunctions in dyslexia might originate from impairments in early pre-attentive processes, which affect behavioral discrimination. Previous studies have shown that whereas dyslexic individuals are deficient in discriminating sound distinctions involving consonants or simple pitch changes, discrimination of other sound aspects, such as tone duration, is intact. We hypothesized that such contrasts that can be discriminated by dyslexic individuals when heard in isolat…
Learning-induced neural plasticity of speech processing before birth
2013
Learning, the foundation of adaptive and intelligent behavior, is based on plastic changes in neural assemblies, reflected by the modulation of electric brain responses. In infancy, auditory learning implicates the formation and strengthening of neural long-term memory traces, improving discrimination skills, in particular those forming the prerequisites for speech perception and understanding. Although previous behavioral observations show that newborns react differentially to unfamiliar sounds vs. familiar sound material that they were exposed to as fetuses, the neural basis of fetal learning has not thus far been investigated. Here we demonstrate direct neural correlates of human fetal l…
Learning by heart : cardiac cycle reveals an effective time window for learning
2018
Cardiac cycle phase is known to modulate processing of simple sensory information. This effect of the heartbeat on brain function is likely exerted via baroreceptors, the neurons sensitive for changes in blood pressure. From baroreceptors, the signal is conveyed all the way to the forebrain and the medial prefrontal cortex. In the two experiments reported, we examined whether learning, as a more complex form of cognition, can be modulated by the cardiac cycle phase. Human participants ( experiment 1) and rabbits ( experiment 2) were trained in trace eyeblink conditioning while neural activity was recorded. The conditioned stimulus was presented contingently with either the systolic or dias…
Lack of neurofibromatosis type 2 gene promoter methylation in sporadic vestibular schwannomas.
2011
<i>Background:</i> Vestibular schwannomas (VS) are benign tumors of the nervous system that are usually sporadic but also occur in the inherited disorder neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2). In VS, losses of chromosomal material and mutations of the NF2 gene have been established to be causative. For a subset of VS without detectable gene alterations, promoter inactivation by hypermethylation has been suggested. However, published data are very limited and contradictory. <i>Methods:</i> We analyzed NF2 gene promoter methylation in 35 sporadic VS by methylation-specific PCR. <i>Results:</i> Twenty-three of the tumors were informative, showing no promoter methyl…
The Influence of Music on Prefrontal Cortex during Episodic Encoding and Retrieval of Verbal Information: A Multichannel fNIRS Study.
2015
Music can be thought of as a complex stimulus able to enrich the encoding of an event thus boosting its subsequent retrieval. However, several findings suggest that music can also interfere with memory performance. A better understanding of the behavioral and neural processes involved can substantially improve knowledge and shed new light on the most efficient music-based interventions. Based on fNIRS studies on music, episodic encoding, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), this work aims to extend previous findings by monitoring the entire lateral PFC during both encoding and retrieval of verbal material. Nineteen participants were asked to encode lists of words presented with eit…
Environmental risk factors for sporadic acoustic neuroma (Interphone Study Group, Germany)
2007
The only known risk factor for sporadic acoustic neuroma is high-dose ionising radiation. Environmental exposures, such as radiofrequency electromagnetic fields and noise are under discussion, as well as an association with allergic diseases. We performed a population-based case-control study in Germany investigating these risk factors in 97 cases with acoustic neuroma, aged 30 to 69 years, and in 194 matched controls. Odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated in multiple logistic regression models. Increased risks were found for exposure to persistent noise (OR=2.31; 95% CI 1.15-4.66), and for hay fever (OR=2.20; 95% CI 1.09-4.45), but not for ionising radiation …
Occupation and risk of glioma, meningioma and acoustic neuroma: results from a German case-control study (interphone study group, Germany)
2010
Background: Several epidemiological studies have investigated the association between occupation and brain tumour risk, but results have been inconclusive. We investigated the association between six occupational categories defined a priori: chemical, metal, agricultural, construction, electrical/electronic and transport, and the risk of glioma, meningioma and acoustic neuroma. Methods: In a population-based case-control study involving a total of 844 cases and 1688 controls conducted from 2000 to 2003, detailed information on life-long job histories was collected during personal interviews and used to create job calendars for each participant. Job title, job activity, job number, and the s…