Providing Instruction Based on Students' Learning Style Preferences Does Not Improve Learning.

Teachers commonly categorize students as visual or auditory learners. Despite a lack of empirical evidence, teaching to a student's perceived learning style remains common practice in education (Pashler et al., 2009).

Spectral integration plasticity in cat auditory cortex induced by perceptual training.

We investigated the ability of cats to discriminate differences between vowel-like spectra, assessed their discrimination ability over time, and compared spectral receptive fields in primary auditory cortex (AI) of trained and untrained cats. Animals were trained to discriminate changes in the spectral envelope of a broad-band harmonic complex in a 2-alternative forced choice procedure. The standard stimulus was an acoustic grating consisting of a harmonic complex with a sinusoidally modulated spectral envelope ("ripple spectrum").

Nonlinear modeling of auditory-nerve rate responses to wideband stimuli.

The spectral selectivity of auditory nerve fibers was characterized by a method based on responses to random-spectrum-shape stimuli. The method models the average discharge rate of fibers for steady stimuli and is based on responses to approximately 100 noise-like stimuli with pseudorandom spectral levels in 1/8- or 1/16-octave frequency bins. The model assumes that rate is determined by a linear weighting of the spectrum plus a second-order weighting of all pairs of spectrum values within a certain frequency range of best frequency.