Neural Mechanisms Underlying the Effects of Novel Sounds on Task Performance in Children With and Without ADHD.

Distractibility is one of the key features of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and has been associated with alterations in the neural orienting and alerting networks. Task-irrelevant stimuli are thus expected to have detrimental effects on the performance of patients with ADHD. However, task-irrelevant presentation of sounds seems to have the opposite effect and improve subsequent attentional performance particularly in patients with ADHD.

Task-Irrelevant Novel Sounds Improve Attentional Performance in Children With and Without ADHD.

Task-irrelevant salient stimuli involuntarily capture attention and can lead to distraction from an ongoing task, especially in children with ADHD. However, there has been tentative evidence that the presentation of novel sounds can have beneficial effects on cognitive performance. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the influence of novel sounds compared to no sound and a repeatedly presented standard sound on attentional performance in children and adolescents with and without ADHD.

On perceived synchrony-neural dynamics of audiovisual illusions and suppressions.

Whenever temporally incongruent audiovisual sequences are presented, the perceived flash rate follows the physical flutter rate. Increasing the auditory flutter rate increases the perceived flicker rate (visual illusions). Likewise, decreasing the flutter rate decreases the perceived flicker rate (visual suppressions).

Neural basis of the ventriloquist illusion.

The ventriloquist creates the illusion that his or her voice emerges from the visibly moving mouth of the puppet [1]. This well-known illusion exemplifies a basic principle of how auditory and visual information is integrated in the brain to form a unified multimodal percept. When auditory and visual stimuli occur simultaneously at different locations, the more spatially precise visual information dominates the perceived location of the multimodal event.

Closer in time when farther in space--spatial factors in audiovisual temporal integration.

We investigated the effect of visual eccentricity and spatial alignment on judgments of audiovisual synchrony. Sequences of flashes at 4, 6, and 8 Hz were presented centrally, or at horizontal eccentricities of 6 degrees or 18 degrees. Concurrent sequences of clicks were presented at the same rate as the flashes, or at higher or lower rates.