A critical examination of the spectral contrast account of compensation for coarticulation

Vocal tract gestures for adjacent phones overlap temporally, rendering the acoustic speech signal highly context dependent. For example, following a segment with an anterior place of articulation, a posterior segment’s place of articulation is pulled frontward, and listeners’ category boundaries shift appropriately. Some theories assume that listeners perceptually attune or compensate for coarticulatory context. An alternative is that shifts result from spectral contrast. Indeed, shifts occur when speech precursors are replaced by pure tones, frequency matched to the formant offset at the assumed locus of contrast (Lotto & Kluender, 1998). However, tone analogues differ from natural formants in several ways, raising the possibility that conditions for contrast may not exist in natural speech. When we matched tones to natural formant intensities and trajectories, boundary shifts diminished. When we presented only the critical spectral region of natural speech tokens, no compensation was observed. These results suggest that conditions for spectral contrast do not exist in typical speech.     

Health Related Quality of Life After Percutaneous Coronary Revascularisation in Patients with Previous Coronary Artery Bypass Grafts: A Two-Year Follow Up Study

Percutaneous coronary revascularisation [PCR] improves angina and health related quality of life [HRQOL] compared to standard medical therapy. It is unknown whether PCR has the same benefits for patients with a history of CABG. Over a period of 5 years, we assessed HRQOL of patients undergoing PCR using Part 1 of the Nottingham Health Profile [NHP] at baseline 3, 12 and 24 months. We compared HRQOL after PCR in 255 patients with CABG to 2680 without. There were more males [81.1% v 69.6% p = 0.002] and older patients [mean age 60.1 years v. 58.0 p = 0.03] in CABG group. Perceived HRQOL improved at 24 months for pain, energy and emotional reaction but the improvement was less in the CABG group. However, mean NHP scores at 24 months for those with CABG had returned to baseline levels for sleep [34.9] and for physical function was worse than at baseline [22.0 vs 30.7]. This relationship persisted after adjustment for male sex, history of previous MI and coronary stent usage. Patients with previous CABG had less improvement in HRQOL after PCR. Further work is needed to assess the benefits and cost effectiveness of PCR in these patients.     

Luck and Oppression

Oppression can be unjust from a luck egalitarian point of view even when it is the consequence of choices for which it is reasonable to hold persons responsible. This is for two reasons. First, people who have not been oppressed are unlikely to anticipate the ways in which their choices may lead them into oppressive conditions. Facts about systematic phenomena (like oppression) are often beyond the epistemic reach of persons who are not currently subject to such conditions, even when they possess adequate information about the particular consequences of their choices. Second, people may be (much) less responsible for remaining in oppressive conditions, even if they are responsible for entering circumstances of oppression. Oppression that results from a person’s choice may cause or contribute to dramatic changes in that person, and these changes may be sufficient to undermine the person’s responsibility for the results of her earlier choice.     

Dynamics of attention in depth: evidence from multi-element tracking

We examined the allocation of attention in depth using a multi-element tracking paradigm. Observers were required to track a predefined subset of from two to eight elements in displays containing up to sixteen identical moving elements. We first show that depth cues, such as binocular disparity and occlusion through T-junctions, improve performance in a multi-element tracking task in the case where element boundaries are allowed to intersect in the depiction of motion in a single frontoparallel plane. We also show that the allocation of attention across two perceptually distinguishable planar surfaces, either frontoparallel or receding at a slanting angle and defined by coplanar elements, is easier than allocation of attention within a single surface. The same result was not found when attention was required to be deployed across items of two-color populations rather than across items of a single color. Our results suggest that, when surface information does not suffice to distinguish between targets and distractors that are embedded in these surfaces, division of attention across two surfaces aids in tracking moving targets. A final experiment with populations of elements moving within distinct volumes produced similar results, suggesting that spatial separation in three dimensions, rather than confinement to surfaces as such, may explain the improved performance for the two-surface case.     

An enquiry into the process of categorization of pictures and words

This paper reports a series of experiments conducted to study the categorization of pictures and words. Whereas some studies reported in the past have found a picture advantage in categorization, other studies have yielded no differences between pictures and words. This paper used an experimental paradigm designed to overcome some methodological problems to examine picture-word categorization. The results of one experiment were consistent with an advantage for pictures in categorization. To identify the source of the picture advantage in categorization, two more experiments were conducted. Findings suggest that semantic relatedness may play an important role in the categorization of both pictures and words. We explain these findings by suggesting that pictures simultaneously access both their concept and visually salient features whereas words may initially access their concept and may subsequently activate features. Therefore, pictures have an advantage in categorization by offering multiple routes to semantic processing.     

Unexpected nanoscale phase separation in sputterdeposited Ni-25 at.%Al thin films

Thin films of nominal composition Ni-25at.%Al, sputter deposited from a target of the intermetallic compound Ni 3 Al on unheated substrates, exhibit an unexpected phase separation, in contrast with other intermetallic-forming systems such as Ti-Al which are deposited as compositionally homogeneous amorphous films under similar conditions. Precipitates of a novel tetragonal phase, a few nanometres in size, were formed in the matrix consisting of a fcc Ni-rich Ni(Al) phase and a hcp Ni-rich Ni(Al) phase. Ni-Al films of the same composition deposited on heated substrates exhibited the formation of a single, chemically long-range-ordered Ni 3 Al phase with the L1 2 structure, the thermodynamically stable phase for this composition.     

Telling the right hand from the left hand: multisensory integration, not motor imagery, solves the problem

Judging the laterality of a hand seen at unanticipated orientations evokes a robust feeling of bodily movement, even though no movement is produced. In two experiments, we tested a novel hypothesis to explain this phenomenon: A hand's laterality is determined via a multisensory binding of the visual representation of the seen hand and a proprioceptive representation of the observer's felt hand, and the felt "movement" is an obligatory aftereffect of intersensory recalibration. Consistent with the predictions implied by such a cross-modal mechanism, our results in Experiment 1 showed that manipulating observers' selective attention can evoke illusory feelings of movement in the "wrong" hand (i.e., the hand whose laterality does not match that of the stimulus). In Experiment 2, these illusions were readily extinguished in conditions in which binding was predicted to fail, a result indicating that cross-modal binding was necessary to produce them. These results are not explained by imagery, a mechanism widely assumed to account for how hand laterality is identified.     

Measuring the Immeasurable: Or "Could Abraham Lincoln Take the Implicit Association Test?"

ABSTRACT— With the Association for Psychological Science's new ethical standards requiring that all research studies include an Implicit Association Test (IAT), forecasters predict that the population of new participants available to take IATs will expire by the year 2023. Shrill, doomsday proposals from IAT experts involve rationing the precious pool of remaining IAT novices or other naive strategies. These solutions demonstrate rigid, scientific thinking, with a distinct lack of the creative flair that makes psychology stand apart from the real sciences. Building on our prior experience of adapting the IAT for measuring infant cognition and rooting out aliens among us, we demonstrate that new pools of participant resources—the unborn and passed on—are available, if we take the time to develop the methods to exploit them. Two studies illustrate some of the methodological challenges and opportunities that must be met in order to make better use of the new populations to keep the IAT juggernaut on its path of global (and interstellar) domination.