How previous experience shapes perception in different sensory modalities.

What has transpired immediately before has a strong influence on how sensory stimuli are processed and perceived. In particular, temporal context can have contrastive effects, repelling perception away from the interpretation of the context stimulus, and attractive effects (TCEs), whereby perception repeats upon successive presentations of the same stimulus. For decades, scientists have documented contrastive and attractive temporal context effects mostly with simple visual stimuli.

Phoneme categorization relying solely on high-frequency energy.

Speech perception studies generally focus on the acoustic information present in the frequency regions below 6 kHz. Recent evidence suggests that there is perceptually relevant information in the higher frequencies, including information affecting speech intelligibility. This experiment examined whether listeners are able to accurately identify a subset of vowels and consonants in CV-context when only high-frequency (above 5 kHz) acoustic information is available (through high-pass filtering and masking of lower frequency energy).

Perceptual compensation for differences in speaking style.

It is well-established that listeners will shift their categorization of a target vowel as a function of acoustic characteristics of a preceding carrier phrase (CP). These results have been interpreted as an example of perceptual normalization for variability resulting from differences in talker anatomy. The present study examined whether listeners would normalize for acoustic variability resulting from differences in speaking style within a single talker.

[Susceptibility of 609 strains of Staphylococcus aureus, isolated during 1973-1974 from various infectious processes in children, to various antibiotics].

Staphylococcus aureus is a bacterium which has shown variations, as to susceptibility, to antimicrobial agents. By the plate dilution method, response to 12 different antibiotics is studied in 609 strains isolated from children admitted, or who attended the outpatient clinic of the Hospital Infantil de México, between 1973 and 1974. Ninety per cent or over, of all strains, were sensitive to eight of the antibiotics.