Temporal regularity effects on pre-attentive and attentive processing of deviance

Temporal regularity allows predicting the temporal locus of future information thereby potentially facilitating cognitive processing. We applied event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate how temporal regularity impacts pre-attentive and attentive processing of deviance in the auditory modality. Participants listened to sequences of sinusoidal tones differing exclusively in pitch. The inter-stimulus interval (ISI) in these sequences was manipulated to convey either isochronous or random temporal structure. In the pre-attentive session, deviance processing was unaffected by the regularity manipulation as evidenced in three event-related-potentials (ERPs): mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a, and reorienting negativity (RON). In the attentive session, the P3b was smaller for deviant tones embedded in irregular temporal structure, while the N2b component remained unaffected. These findings confirm that temporal regularity can reinforce cognitive mechanisms associated with the attentive processing of deviance. Furthermore, they provide evidence for the dynamic allocation of attention in time and dissociable pre-attentive and attention-dependent temporal processing mechanisms

Be Opened!

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. After you have messed up, or made a mistake, or made a poor choice, have you sometimes heard a voice whispering to you, “You just didn’t listen”

Survival of bacteria introduced into soil :: the influence of inoculation conditions, particle association, extractable soil components, and inoculum density /

Thesis (M.S.

Musical training modulates the early but not the late stage of rhythmic syntactic processing

Syntactic processing is essential for musical understanding. Although the processing of harmonic syntax has been well studied, very little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying rhythmic syntactic processing. The present study investigated the neural processing of rhythmic syntax and whether and to what extent long-term musical training impacts such processing. Fourteen musicians and 14 nonmusicians listened to syntactic-regular or -irregular rhythmic sequences and judged the completeness of these sequences. Musicians, as well as nonmusicians, showed a P600 effect to syntactic-irregular endings, indicating that musical exposure and perceptual learning of music are sufficient to enable nonmusicians to process rhythmic syntax at the late stage. However, musicians, but not nonmusicians, also exhibited an ERAN response to syntactic-irregular endings, which suggests that musical training only modulates the early but not the late stage of rhythmic syntactic processing. These findings revealed for the first time the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of rhythmic syntax in music, which has important implications for theories of hierarchically-organized music cognition and comparative studies of syntactic processing in music and language

The influence of personality traits on attitudes towards climate change – An exploratory study

This study used a trait-level approach to understanding pro-environmental behavior in the context of climate change. We asked 194 adult participants to report their belief in climate change and their risk perception and then tested the correlation between self-reported Big Five traits, trait-level anxiety, and empathy. Our analysis revealed that Openness, Perspective Taking, sex, and age correlate with climate change attitudes. These results increase our understanding of environmental challenges to the general public and offer implications for future research on how to execute pro-environmental strategies