Search results for "Auditory"
showing 10 items of 568 documents
Prevalence and risk factors for sensorineural hearing loss: Western Sicily overview.
2013
The objective of this work was to evaluate the prevalence of sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) and distribution of the main risk factors associated to it focusing on their role in the development of deafness and their interaction. We performed a global audiological assessment (through TEOAE, tympanometry and ABR) in 508 infants at risk studying the main risk factors reported by Joint Committee on Infant Hearing (2007). Fifty-one infants (10.03 %) were diagnosed with SNHL (45 bilateral and 6 unilateral) with a mean hearing threshold of 87.39 ± 28.25 dB HL; family history of hearing impairment (HI) and TORCH infections indicated independent significant risk factors (P < 0.00001 and P = 0.0…
The role of atopy in otitis media with effusion among primary school children: audiological investigation
2010
The objective of this study was to evaluate the role of atopy in otitis media with effusion (OME) in children attending primary school in western Sicily focusing on the audiological characteristics among atopic and non-atopic subjects suffering from OME. A total of 310 children (5-6 years old) were screened by skin tests and divided into atopics (G1) and non-atopics (G2). The samples were evaluated for OME by pneumatic otoscopy, tympanogram and acoustic reflex tests. The parameters considered were: documented persistent middle ear effusion by otoscopic examination for a minimum of 3 months; presence of B or C tympanogram; absence of ipsilateral acoustic reflex and a conductive hearing loss …
Cochlear implant users move in time to the beat of drum music.
2015
Cochlear implant users show a profile of residual, yet poorly understood, musical abilities. An ability that has received little to no attention in this population is entrainment to a musical beat. We show for the first time that a heterogeneous group of cochlear implant users is able to find the beat and move their bodies in time to Latin Merengue music, especially when the music is presented in unpitched drum tones. These findings not only reveal a hidden capacity for feeling musical rhythm through the body in the deaf and hearing impaired population, but illuminate promising avenues for designing early childhood musical training that can engage implanted children in social musical activi…
Auditory cortex reflects goal-directed movement but is not necessary for behavioral adaptation in sound-cued reward tracking
2020
Mounting evidence suggests that the role of sensory cortices in perceptual decision making goes beyond the mere representation of the discriminative stimuli and additionally involves the representation of nonsensory variables such as reward expectation. However, the relevance of these representations for behavior is not clear. To address this issue, we trained rats to discriminate sounds in a single-interval forced-choice task and then confronted the animals with unsignaled blockwise changes of reward probabilities. We found that unequal reward probabilities for the two choice options led to substantial shifts in response bias without concomitant reduction in stimulus discrimination. Althou…
The reliability of continuous brain responses during naturalistic listening to music
2015
Low-level (timbral) and high-level (tonal and rhythmical) musical features during continuous listening to music, studied by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have been shown to elicit large-scale responses in cognitive, motor, and limbic brain networks. Using a similar methodological approach and a similar group of participants, we aimed to study the replicability of previous findings. Participants' fMRI responses during continuous listening of a tango Nuevo piece were correlated voxelwise against the time series of a set of perceptually validated musical features computationally extracted from the music. The replicability of previous results and the present study was assessed b…
The chronnectome of musical beat
2020
Keeping time is fundamental for our everyday existence. Various isochronous activities, such as locomotion, require us to use internal timekeeping. This phenomenon comes into play also in other human pursuits such as dance and music. When listening to music, we spontaneously perceive and predict its beat. The process of beat perception comprises both beat inference and beat maintenance, their relative importance depending on the salience of beat in the music. To study functional connectivity associated with these processes in a naturalistic situation, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain responses of participants while they were listening to a piece of music contai…
BENEFITS OF MULTI-DOMAIN FEATURE OF MISMATCH NEGATIVITY EXTRACTED BY NON-NEGATIVE TENSOR FACTORIZATION FROM EEG COLLECTED BY LOW-DENSITY ARRAY
2012
Through exploiting temporal, spectral, time-frequency representations, and spatial properties of mismatch negativity (MMN) simultaneously, this study extracts a multi-domain feature of MMN mainly using non-negative tensor factorization. In our experiment, the peak amplitude of MMN between children with reading disability and children with attention deficit was not significantly different, whereas the new feature of MMN significantly discriminated the two groups of children. This is because the feature was derived from multi-domain information with significant reduction of the heterogeneous effect of datasets.
Enhancement of brain event-related potentials to speech sounds is associated with compensated reading skills in dyslexic children with familial risk …
2014
Specific reading disability, dyslexia, is a prevalent and heritable disorder impairing reading acquisition characterized by a phonological deficit. However, the underlying mechanism of how the impaired phonological processing mediates resulting dyslexia or reading disabilities remains still unclear. Using ERPs we studied speech sound processing of 30 dyslexic children with familial risk for dyslexia, 51 typically reading children with familial risk for dyslexia, and 58 typically reading control children. We found enhanced brain responses to shortening of a phonemic length in pseudo-words (/at:a/ vs. /ata/) in dyslexic children with familial risk as compared to other groups. The enhanced bra…
Auditory event-related potentials show altered hemispheric responses in dyslexia
2011
Dyslexia is characterized by deficits in phonological processing abilities. However, it is unclear what the underlying factors for poor phonological abilities or speech sound representations are. One hypothesis suggests that individuals with dyslexia have problems in basic acoustic perception which in turn can also cause problems in speech perception. Here basic auditory processing was assessed by auditory event-related potentials recorded for paired tones presented in an oddball paradigm in 9-year-old children with dyslexia and a familial background of dyslexia, typically reading children at familial risk for dyslexia and control children without risk for dyslexia. The tone pairs elicited …
Audiologic profile of infants at risk: experience of a Western Sicily tertiary care centre.
2012
Objective: To identify the incidence of sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) on infant at risk and to classify the degree and type of hearing loss describing the main causes associated in Western Sicily. To compare single TEOAE and combined TEOAE/ABR techniques studying the referral rate, the false-positive and false-negative rates through concordance test (κ coefficient), sensitivity (TPR) and specificity (TNR) for each protocol. Methods: From January 2010 to June 2011, 412 infants at risk, ranging from 4 to 20 weeks of life, transferred to Audiology Department of Palermo from the births centers of Western Sicily, underwent to audiological assessment with TEOAE, tympanometry and ABR. The foll…