Soundscape Awareness Intervention Reduced Neuropsychiatric Symptoms in Nursing Home Residents With Dementia: A Cluster-Randomized Trial With MoSART.

Objectives: Auditory environments as perceived by an individual, also called soundscapes, are often suboptimal for nursing home residents. Poor soundscapes have been associated with neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS). We evaluated the effect of the Mobile Soundscape Appraisal and Recording Technology sound awareness intervention (MoSART+) on NPS in nursing home residents with dementia.

Soundscape Optimization in Nursing Homes Through Raising Awareness in Nursing Staff With MoSART.

Introduction: Soundscapes in nursing homes are often suboptimal for residents. This can cause them feeling anxious and unsafe, or develop behavioral and psychological problems. Residents with dementia cannot adapt nursing home environments to their needs due to cognitive and physical limitations.

Coping and Co-creation: One Attempt and One Route to Well-being. Part 2. Application to Identity and Social Well-being.

Background: This is the application part of a two-part paper that starts from the assumption that core cognition for promoting agent well-being is shared by all living beings. In Part 1, we derived a number of key terms of core cognition and two behavioral ontologies: coping and co-creation.

Objective: Our first aim is to extend the conceptual framework and two behavioral ontologies, while explaining, from first principles, the observed basic structure in identity development.

Coping and Co-creation: One Attempt and One Route to Well-Being. Part 1. Conceptual Framework.

Background: All life strives to be well, but not all life is well. This suggests that cognition aimed at improving and protecting well-being might share a common core across all life forms: core cognition.

Objective: In this first of a two-part theoretical article, we systematically specify the evolutionary core cognition of well-being from the perspective of general living agents.

Sounds in nursing homes and their effect on health in dementia: a systematic review.

Objectives: Nursing home residents with dementia are sensitive to detrimental auditory environments. This paper presents the first literature review of empirical research investigating (1) the (perceived) intensity and sources of sounds in nursing homes, and (2) the influence of sounds on health of residents with dementia and staff.

Design: A systematic review was conducted in PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus.

Validation of a modified ambiance scale in nursing homes.

Objectives: We translated and modified an ambiance scale for use by (in)formal caregivers in Dutch nursing homes. We tested validity and reliability of the modified Ambiance Scale.

Method: Convenience sampling was used to enrol (in)formal caregivers in three nursing homes in the Netherlands.

The Evolution of Soundscape Appraisal Through Enactive Cognition.

We propose a framework based on evolutionary principles and the theory of enactive cognition ("being by doing"), that addresses the foundation of key results and central questions of soundscape research. We hypothesize that the two main descriptors (measures of how people perceive the acoustic environment) of soundscape appraisal ('pleasantness' and 'eventfulness'), reflect evolutionarily old motivational and affective systems that promote survival through preferences for certain environments and avoidance of others. Survival is aimed at ending or avoiding existential threats and protecting viability in a deficient environment.

Visual and auditory temporal integration in healthy younger and older adults.

As people age, they tend to integrate successive visual stimuli over longer intervals than younger adults. It may be expected that temporal integration is affected similarly in other modalities, possibly due to general, age-related cognitive slowing of the brain. However, the previous literature does not provide convincing evidence that this is the case in audition.

Cognition from life: the two modes of cognition that underlie moral behavior.

We argue that the capacity to live life to the benefit of self and others originates in the defining properties of life. These lead to two modes of cognition; the coping mode that is preoccupied with the satisfaction of pressing needs and the co-creation mode that aims at the realization of a world where pressing needs occur less frequently. We have used the Rule of Conservative Changes - stating that new functions can only scaffold on evolutionary older, yet highly stable functions - to predict that the interplay of these two modes define a number of core functions in psychology associated with moral behavior.

Temporal integration of consecutive tones into synthetic vowels demonstrates perceptual assembly in audition.

Temporal integration is the perceptual process combining sensory stimulation over time into longer percepts that can span over 10 times the duration of a minimally detectable stimulus. Particularly in the auditory domain, such "long-term" temporal integration has been characterized as a relatively simple function that acts chiefly to bridge brief input gaps, and which places integrated stimuli on temporal coordinates while preserving their temporal order information. These properties are not observed in visual temporal integration, suggesting they might be modality specific.

Perceptual restoration of degraded speech is preserved with advancing age.

Cognitive skills, such as processing speed, memory functioning, and the ability to divide attention, are known to diminish with aging. The present study shows that, despite these changes, older adults can successfully compensate for degradations in speech perception. Critically, the older participants of this study were not pre-selected for high performance on cognitive tasks, but only screened for normal hearing.

Learning autonomy in two or three steps: linking open-ended development, authority, and agency to motivation.

In this paper we connect open-ended development, authority, agency, and motivation through (1) an analysis of the demands of existing in a complex world and (2) environmental appraisal in terms of affordance content and the complexity to select appropriate behavior. We do this by identifying a coherent core from a wide range of contributing fields. Open-ended development is a structured three-step process in which the agent first learns to master the body and then aims to make the mind into a reliable tool.

Positioning soundscape research and management.

This paper is an outcome of a workshop that addressed the question how soundscape research can improve its impact on the local level. It addresses a number of topics by complementing existing approaches and practices with possible future approaches and practices. The paper starts with an analysis of the role of sound annoyance and suboptimal soundscapes on the lives of individuals and concludes that a good soundscape, or more generally a good sensescape, is at the same time pleasant as well as conducive for the adoption of healthy habits.

How pleasant sounds promote and annoying sounds impede health: a cognitive approach.

This theoretical paper addresses the cognitive functions via which quiet and in general pleasurable sounds promote and annoying sounds impede health. The article comprises a literature analysis and an interpretation of how the bidirectional influence of appraising the environment and the feelings of the perceiver can be understood in terms of core affect and motivation. This conceptual basis allows the formulation of a detailed cognitive model describing how sonic content, related to indicators of safety and danger, either allows full freedom over mind-states or forces the activation of a vigilance function with associated arousal.

Audiovisual perception of congruent and incongruent Dutch front vowels.

Purpose: Auditory perception of vowels in background noise is enhanced when combined with visually perceived speech features. The objective of this study was to investigate whether the influence of visual cues on vowel perception extends to incongruent vowels, in a manner similar to the McGurk effect observed with consonants.

Method: Identification of Dutch front vowels /i, y, e, Y/ that share all features other than height and lip-rounding was measured for congruent and incongruent audiovisual conditions.