Search results for "Audit"
showing 10 items of 1421 documents
Evidence of beat perception via purely tactile stimulation
2008
Humans can easily tap in synchrony with an auditory beat but not with an equivalent visual rhythmic sequence, suggesting that the sensation of meter (i.e. of an underlying regular pulse) may be inherently auditory. We assessed whether the perception of meter could also be felt with tactile sensory inputs. We found that, when participants were presented with identical rhythmic sequences filled with either short tones or hand stimulations, they could more efficiently tap in synchrony with strongly rather than weakly metric sequences. These observations suggest that non-musician adults can extract the metric structure of purely tactile rhythms and use it to tap regularly with the beat induced …
The role of musical aptitude and language skills in preattentive duration processing in school-aged children
2009
We examined 10-12-year old elementary school children's ability to preattentively process sound durations in music and speech stimuli. In total, 40 children had either advanced foreign language production skills and higher musical aptitude or less advanced results in both musicality and linguistic tests. Event-related potential (ERP) recordings of the mismatch negativity (MMN) show that the duration changes in musical sounds are more prominently and accurately processed than changes in speech sounds. Moreover, children with advanced pronunciation and musicality skills displayed enhanced MMNs to duration changes in both speech and musical sounds. Thus, our study provides further evidence for…
Cortical processing of musical sounds in children with Cochlear Implants
2012
Abstract Objective We studied the neurocognitive mechanisms of musical instrument sound perception in children with Cochlear Implants (CIs) and in children with normal hearing (NH). Methods ERPs were recorded in a new multi-feature change-detection paradigm. Three magnitudes of change in fundamental frequency, musical instrument, duration, intensity increments and decrements, and presence of a temporal gap were presented amongst repeating 295 Hz piano tones. Independent Component Analysis was utilized to remove artifacts caused by the Cochlear Implants. Results The ERPs were similar in the two groups across all perceptual dimensions except for intensity increment deviants. CI children had s…
Media multitasking is associated with distractibility and increased prefrontal activity in adolescents and young adults.
2016
The current generation of young people indulges in more media multitasking behavior (e.g., instant messaging while watching videos) in their everyday lives than older generations. Concerns have been raised about how this might affect their attentional functioning, as previous studies have indicated that extensive mediamultitasking in everyday life may be associated with decreased attentional control. In the current study, 149 adolescents and young adults (aged 13-24 years) performed speech-listening and reading tasks that required maintaining attention in the presence of distractor stimuli in the othermodality or dividing attention between two concurrent tasks. Brain activity during task pe…
Reading skill and neural processing accuracy improvement after a 3-hour intervention in preschoolers with difficulties in reading-related skills
2012
This study aimed at determining whether an intervention game developed for strengthening phonological awareness has a remediating effect on reading skills and central auditory processing in 6-year-old preschool children with difficulties in reading-related skills. After a 3-hour training only, these children made a greater progress in reading-related skills than did their matched controls who did mathematical exercises following comparable training format. Furthermore, the results suggest that this brief intervention might be beneficial in modulating the neural basis of phonetic discrimination as an enhanced speech-elicited mismatch negativity (MMN) was seen in the intervention group, indic…
Development and reliability of a streetscape observation instrument for international use: MAPS-global
2018
Background: Relationships between several built environment factors and physical activity and walking behavior are well established, but internationally-comparable built environment measures are lacking. The Microscale Audit of Pedestrian Streetscapes (MAPS)-Global is an observational measure of detailed streetscape features relevant to physical activity that was developed for international use. This study examined the inter-observer reliability of the instrument in five countries. Methods: MAPS-Global was developed by compiling concepts and items from eight environmental measures relevant to walking and bicycling. Inter-rater reliability data were collected in neighborhoods selected to var…
Somatic mutation profiles as molecular classifiers of ulcerative colitis-associated colorectal cancer.
2021
Ulcerative colitis increases colorectal cancer risk by mechanisms that remain incompletely understood. We approached this question by determining the genetic and epigenetic profiles of colitis-associated colorectal carcinomas (CA-CRC). The findings were compared to Lynch syndrome (LS), a different form of cancer predisposition that shares the importance of immunological factors in tumorigenesis. CA-CRCs (n=27) were investigated for microsatellite instability, CpG island methylator phenotype, and somatic mutations of 999 cancer-relevant genes ("Pan-cancer" panel). A subpanel of "Pan-cancer" design (578 genes) was used for LS colorectal tumors (n=28). Mutational loads and signatures stratifie…
Memory-Based Mismatch Response to Frequency Changes in Rats
2011
Any occasional changes in the acoustic environment are of potential importance for survival. In humans, the preattentive detection of such changes generates the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of event-related brain potentials. MMN is elicited to rare changes (‘deviants’) in a series of otherwise regularly repeating stimuli (‘standards’). Deviant stimuli are detected on the basis of a neural comparison process between the input from the current stimulus and the sensory memory trace of the standard stimuli. It is, however, unclear to what extent animals show a similar comparison process in response to auditory changes. To resolve this issue, epidural potentials were recorded above the pr…
Abnormal synchrony and effective connectivity in patients with schizophrenia and auditory hallucinations
2014
Auditory hallucinations (AH) are the most frequent positive symptoms in patients with schizophrenia. Hallucinations have been related to emotional processing disturbances, altered functional connectivity and effective connectivity deficits. Previously, we observed that, compared to healthy controls, the limbic network responses of patients with auditory hallucinations differed when the subjects were listening to emotionally charged words. We aimed to compare the synchrony patterns and effective connectivity of task-related networks between schizophrenia patients with and without AH and healthy controls. Schizophrenia patients with AH (n = 27) and without AH (n = 14) were compared with healt…
Predicting intention to participate in self-management behaviors in patients with Familial Hypercholesterolemia: A cross-national study.
2019
Rationale. Familial Hypercholesterolemia (FH) is a genetic condition that predisposes patients to substantially increased risk of early-onset atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. FH risks can be minimized through regular participation in three self-management. Behaviors. physical activity, healthy eating, and taking cholesterol lowering medication. Objective. The present study tested the effectiveness of an integrated social cognition model in predicting intention to participate in the self-management behaviors in FH patients from seven countries. Method. Consecutive patients in FH clinics from Australia, Hong Kong, Brazil, Malaysia, Taiwan, China, and UK (total N = 726) completed measur…