Relaxing effects of music and odors on physiological recovery after cognitive stress and unexpected absence of multisensory benefit.

Several studies have described, often separately, the relaxing effects of music or odor on the autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity. Only a few studies compared the presentation of these stimuli and their interaction within a same experimental protocol. Here, we examined whether relaxing music (slow-paced classical pieces) and odor (lavender essential oil) either presented in isolation or in combination would facilitate physiological recovery after cognitive stress.

The timing database: An open-access, live repository for interval timing studies.

Interval timing refers to the ability to perceive and remember intervals in the seconds to minutes range. Our contemporary understanding of interval timing is derived from relatively small-scale, isolated studies that investigate a limited range of intervals with a small sample size, usually based on a single task. Consequently, the conclusions drawn from individual studies are not readily generalizable to other tasks, conditions, and task parameters.

Rapid neural categorization of facelike objects predicts the perceptual awareness of a face (face pareidolia).

The human brain rapidly and automatically categorizes faces vs. other visual objects. However, whether face-selective neural activity predicts the subjective experience of a face - perceptual awareness - is debated.

Relaxing and stimulating effects of odors on time perception and their modulation by expectancy.

Although several studies have reported relaxing and stimulating effects of odors on physiology and behavior, little is known about their underlying mechanisms. It has been proposed that participant expectancy could explain these activation effects. Since emotional stimuli are known to modulate time perception, here we used the temporal bisection task to determine whether odors have objective relaxing and stimulating effects by respectively slowing down or speeding up the internal clock and whether prior expectancy could alter these effects.

Age differences in olfactory affective responses: evidence for a positivity effect and an emotional dedifferentiation.

Studies on aging and hedonic judgment of odors have never been addressed within the empirical frameworks of age-related changes in emotion which state that advancing age is associated with a reduced negativity bias and a less pronounced differentiation between hedonic valence and emotional intensity judgments. Our aim was to examine and extend these age-related effects into the field of odors. Thirty-eight younger adults and 40 older adults were asked to evaluate the hedonic valence, emotional intensity, and familiarity of 50 odors controlled for their pleasantness.

A Developmental Study of the Self-Prioritization Effect in Children Between 6 and 10 Years of Age.

Self-biases are well described in adults but remain poorly understood in children. Here, we investigated in 6-10 year-old children (N = 132) the self-prioritization effect (SPE), a self-bias which reflects, in adults, the perceptual advantage for stimuli arbitrarily associated with the self as compared to those associated with other persons. We designed a child-friendly adaptation of a paradigm originally introduced in adults by Sui, He, and Humphreys (2012) in order to test whether the SPE also occurs in children and if so, to determine its evolution with age.

Tuning functions for automatic detection of brief changes of facial expression in the human brain.

Efficient decoding of even brief and slight intensity facial expression changes is important for social interactions. However, robust evidence for the human brain ability to automatically detect brief and subtle changes of facial expression remains limited. Here we built on a recently developed paradigm in human electrophysiology with full-blown expressions (Dzhelyova et al.

Feeling of control of an action after supra and subliminal haptic distortions.

Here we question the mechanisms underlying the emergence of the feeling of control that can be modulated even when the feeling of being the author of one's own action is intact. With a haptic robot, participants made series of vertical pointing actions on a virtual surface, which was sometimes postponed by a small temporal delay (15 or 65 ms). Subjects then evaluated their subjective feeling of control.

Got rhythm…for better and for worse. Cross-modal effects of auditory rhythm on visual word recognition.

The present research aimed to investigate whether, as previously observed with pictures, background auditory rhythm would also influence visual word recognition. In a lexical decision task, participants were presented with bisyllabic visual words, segmented into two successive groups of letters, while an irrelevant strongly metric auditory sequence was played in a loop. The first group of letters could either be congruent with the syllabic division of the word (e.

Gender-based prototype formation in face recognition.

The role of gender categories in prototype formation during face recognition was investigated in 2 experiments. The participants were asked to learn individual faces and then to recognize them. During recognition, individual faces were mixed with faces, which were blended faces of same or different genders.

Brain lateralization of metrical accenting in musicians.

The perception of meter, or the alternation of strong and weak beats, was assessed in musically trained listeners through magnetoencephalography. Metrical accents were examined with no temporal disruption of the serial grouping of tones. Results showed an effect of metrical processing among identical standard tones in the left hemisphere, with larger responses on strong than on weak beats.

Perceiving rhythm where none exists: event-related potential (ERP) correlates of subjective accenting.

Previous research suggests that our past experience of rhythmic structure in music results in a tendency for Western listeners to subjectively accent equitonal isochronous sequences. We have shown in an earlier study that the occurrence of a slightly softer tone in the 8th to 11th position of such a sequence evokes a P300 event-related potential (ERP) response of different amplitudes depending on whether the tone occurs in putatively subjectively accented or unaccented sequence positions (Brochard et al., 2003).

Evidence of beat perception via purely tactile stimulation.

Humans can easily tap in synchrony with an auditory beat but not with an equivalent visual rhythmic sequence, suggesting that the sensation of meter (i.e. of an underlying regular pulse) may be inherently auditory.

Selecting one of two regular sound sequences: perceptual and motor effects of tempo.

This study assessed the influence of tempo on selecting a sound sequence. In Exp. 1, synchronization with one of the two regular subsequences in a complex sequence was measured.

Visual motion disambiguation by a subliminal sound.

There is growing interest in the effect of sound on visual motion perception. One model involves the illusion created when two identical objects moving towards each other on a two-dimensional visual display can be seen to either bounce off or stream through each other. Previous studies show that the large bias normally seen toward the streaming percept can be modulated by the presentation of an auditory event at the moment of coincidence.

Auditory temporal processing in schizophrenia: high level rather than low level deficits?

Introduction: Patients with schizophrenia demonstrate a wide range of information processing deficits. Most recent studies argue in favour of high level deficits, including attention and context processing, whereas fewer studies have demonstrated deficits at earlier stages of processing, such as perceptual discrimination and organisation. This is the first study to investigate both high and low level processing, within a single paradigm, in the case of auditory temporal processing in schizophrenia.

Perceptual encoding of fingerspelled and printed alphabet by deaf signers: an fMRI study.

We measured brain activation during the perception of fingerspelled letters, printed letters, and abstract shapes (control condition) in six congenitally, profoundly deaf signers and six normal hearing subjects. Normal hearing subjects showed essentially extrastriate activation in the fingerspelled letters and printed letters conditions whereas deaf subjects showed activation of a broader network in printed letters and fingerspelled conditions, comprising supplementary frontal and posterior areas, and the supramarginal gyrus (Brodmann Area 6). These results suggest that, on one hand, different cerebral areas in deaf and hearing subjects mediate processing of printed letters and, on the other hand, common cerebral areas are activated in deaf signers when they are engaged in processing fingerspelled or printed letters.

Effect of musical expertise on visuospatial abilities: evidence from reaction times and mental imagery.

Recently, the relationship between music and nonmusical cognitive abilities has been highly debated. It has been documented that formal music training would improve verbal, mathematical or visuospatial performance in children. In the experiments described here, we tested if visual perception and imagery abilities were enhanced in adult musicians compared with nonmusicians.

The "ticktock" of our internal clock: direct brain evidence of subjective accents in isochronous sequences.

The phenomenon commonly known as subjective accenting refers to the fact that identical sound events within purely isochronous sequences are perceived as unequal. Although subjective accenting has been extensively explored using behavioral methods, no physiological evidence has ever been provided for it. In the present study, we tested the notion that these perceived irregularities are related to the dynamic deployment of attention.

Perceptual organization of complex auditory sequences: effect of number of simultaneous subsequences and frequency separation.

Previous findings on streaming are generalized to sequences composed of more than 2 subsequences. A new paradigm identified whether listeners perceive complex sequences as a single unit (integrative listening) or segregate them into 2 (or more) perceptual units (stream segregation). Listeners heard 2 complex sequences, each composed of 1, 2, 3, or 4 subsequences.

Enhanced endocrine response to novel environment stress and endotoxin in Lurcher mutant mice.

Lurcher mutant mice which are mainly known for their cerebellar degeneration, also display a hyperinducibility of proinflammatory cytokines, such as interleukin-1alpha and beta (IL-1) and tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha), in peripheral macrophages. To assess whether this increased responsiveness to inflammatory stimuli is accompanied by a higher pituitary-adrenal response, we compared the adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) and corticosterone response of Lc and wild-type mice to intraperitoneal (i.p.

Perceptual attenuation of nonfocused auditory streams.

The aim of this study was to measure the perceptual attenuation, measured in decibels, resulting from the focusing of attention on one stream within a multistream auditory sequence. The intensity of a nonfocused stream was increased until the accuracy of detecting a temporal irregularity in this stream was the same as in a focused stream. Eight subjects were required to detect a temporal irregularity created by delaying or advancing one tone which could be situated in one of three temporally regular streams played simultaneously to create a multistream sequence.