Publications by authors named "Aysha Motala"

Many older adults live with some form of hearing loss and have difficulty understanding speech in the presence of background sound. Experiences resulting from such difficulties include increased listening effort and fatigue. Social interactions may become less appealing in the context of such experiences, and age-related hearing loss is associated with an increased risk of social isolation and associated negative psychosocial health outcomes.

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Each year in Canada, a substantial number of adults undergo limb amputation, with lower limb amputation (LLA) the most prevalent. Enhancing walking ability is crucial for optimizing rehabilitation outcomes, promoting participation, and facilitating community reintegration. Overcoming challenges during the acute post-amputation phase and sub-acute rehabilitation necessitates alternative approaches, such as motor imagery and mental practice, to maximize rehabilitation success.

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We investigated perceived timing in auditory rate perception using a reproduction task. The study aimed to test (a) whether central tendency occurs in rate perception, as shown for interval timing, and (b) whether rate is perceived independently on each trial or shows a serial dependence, as shown for other perceptual attributes. Participants were well able to indicate perceived rate as reproduced and presented rates were linearly related with a slope that approached unity, although tapping significantly overestimated presented rates.

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An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

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Sensory adaptation experiments have revealed the existence of 'rate after-effects' - adapting to a relatively fast rate makes an intermediate test rate feel slow, and adapting to a slow rate makes the same moderate test rate feel fast. The present work aims to deconstruct the concept of rate and clarify how exactly the brain processes a regular sequence of sensory signals. We ask whether rate forms a distinct perceptual metric, or whether it is simply the perceptual aggregate of the intervals between its component signals.

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Accurate time perception is critical for a number of human behaviours, such as understanding speech and the appreciation of music. However, it remains unresolved whether sensory time perception is mediated by a central timing component regulating all senses, or by a set of distributed mechanisms, each dedicated to a single sensory modality and operating in a largely independent manner. To address this issue, we conducted a range of unimodal and cross-modal rate adaptation experiments, in order to establish the degree of specificity of classical after-effects of sensory adaptation.

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