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Hearing the remote past seems impossible. Archaeoacoustics is a contemporary field intent on reconstructing the evolution of early communication systems, offering the possibility of developing methodologies relating to past sound signaling and music. Through a contribution of the emerging sensory field of archaeoacoustics and an example of acoustic assessments conducted at the site of Coves del Toll, can we understand signals of the past in order to investigate human behaviour and trace its cognitive evolution? This paper explores alternative methodological and theoretical approaches to understanding prehistoric sonic behaviours in early hominids and aims to set out a framework to theoretically and philosophically approach the "sound record" of the past. The theoretical proposition of this paper integrates the musical and sound art disciplines of spectralism and sound ecology to challenge the current limitations of listening to sound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Speech communication is multi-sensory in nature. Seeing a speaker's head and face movements may significantly influence the listeners' speech processing, especially when the auditory information is not clear enough. However, research on the visual-auditory integration speech processing has left prosodic perception less well investigated than segmental perception. Furthermore, while native Japanese speakers tend to use less visual cues in segmental perception than in other western languages, to what extent the visual cues are used in Japanese focus perception by the native and non-native listeners remains unknown. To fill in these gaps, we test focus perception in Japanese among native Japanese speakers and Cantonese speakers who learn Japanese, using auditory-only and auditory-visual sentences as stimuli. Methodology: Thirty native Tokyo Japanese speakers and thirty Cantonesespeaking Japanese learners who had passed the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test with level N2 or N3 were asked to judge the naturalness of 28 questionanswer pairs made up of broad focus eliciting questions and three-word answers carrying broad focus, or contrastive or non-contrastive narrow focus on the middle object words. Question-answer pairs were presented in two sensory modalities, auditory-only and visual-auditory modalities in two separate experimental sessions. Results: Both the Japanese and Cantonese groups showed weak integration of visual cues in the judgement of naturalness. Visual-auditory modality only significantly influenced Japanese participants' perception when the questions and answers were mismatched, but when the answers carried non-contrastive narrow focus, the visual cues impeded rather than facilitated their judgement. Also, the influences of specific visual cues like the displacement of eyebrows or head movements of both Japanese and Cantonese participantsŠ responses were only significant when the questions and answers were mismatched. While Japanese participants consistently relied on the left eyebrow for focus perception, the Cantonese participants referred to head movements more often. Discussion: The lack of visual-auditory integration in Japanese speaking population found in segmental perception also exist in prosodic perception of focus. Not much foreign language effects has been found among the Cantonesespeaking learners either, suggesting a limited use of facial expressions in focus marking by native and non-native Japanese speakers. Overall, the present findings indicate that the integration of visual cues in perception of focus may be specific to languages rather than universal, adding to our understanding of multisensory speech perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adaptation is a ubiquitous property of perceptual systems, increasing sensitivity to change and allowing them to operate over a large dynamic range. The number sense , like most other perceptual systems, is adaptable. Yousif et al. (2024) challenge the existence of number adaptation, offering an alternate explanation that they term the "old news hypothesis". Here we consider the major evidence advanced for their theory and show that, while their predicted effects may reach statistical significance, they are far too small to begin to explain the robust phenomenon of adaptation. We also highlight a series of studies using fMRI, EEG, pupillometry and psychophysical techniques that support the existence of adaption, and are inconsistent with "old news". We conclude that number adaptation, while not fully understood, does indeed exist, and remains an invaluable concept for understanding the number sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Project MindCatcher is an art/research project which has the intention to explore the potential of interactive artistic environments for measuring and a better understanding of creative experience and contribute to further development of co-creative artistic/design process. For that purpose, we created the Floor Interface and collected a set of data from its interactive points such as: personal information from the login process, abstract multi-sensory artefacts created by visitors, visitors' walking paths from the floor interface, video shooting of their behaviour on the floor interface during the sessions, results from the interviews which were done with visitors and personal observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While we humans exist in space through our bodies, we experience it via all our senses and build up an integrated knowledge of the world in our memories. However, children’s conception of the world differs from adults due to their developmental stages. This study aims to examine human-space interaction with a new approach to reveal the effects of sensory stimuli on children's perception and memory of space. The case study was conducted in a theme park that offers various sensory stimuli with particularly designed spaces and activities. For the behavioral data, the spatial preferences of the participants (33 children, age 10) were recorded during the tour, and for the memory data participants were asked to draw pictures (cognitive maps) afterwards. The data sets were redefined by the main sensory stimuli offered by the spatial units (spatial data), and the number of stimulus experiences and the number of stimulus recalls were analyzed comparatively. Contrary to popular belief, the results show that (1) all of the senses take part in perception depending on the existing stimuli in the space, vision does not have any precedence; (2) the functioning of the senses during an experience changes depending on how much stimulus they are exposed to and how much the body participates in the perception process; (3) kinesthetic stimuli come to the fore as the best stored stimuli in memory, whereas the taste stimuli remain in the background as the least remembered ones. The case study group was limited, the subjective aspects of perception, and the age and gender differences that may exist are ignored. With the inclusion of age and gender factors precisely, this methodology could reveal promising alternatives for design methods and guide the production of all types of architectural spaces, including the children's spaces. This study proposes an original perspective that regards both the physical and social components of the space as the source of perception; and it attempts to make up for a deficiency by regarding the children who are mostly neglected in other studies, yet are active users of the space.

The space surrounding our body is called peripersonal space (PPS). It has been reported that visuo-tactile facilitation occurs more strongly within PPS than outside PPS. Furthermore, previous research has revealed several methods by which PPS can be extended. The present study provides the first behavioral evidence of the transfer of PPS in a virtual environment by a novel technique. PPS representation was investigated using a remote-controlled hand avatar presented far from the body in a virtual environment. Participants showed strongest visuo-tactile facilitation at the far space around the remote hand and no facilitation at the near space around the real hand, suggesting that PPS transfers from near the body to the space around the hand avatar. The present results extend previous findings of the plasticity of PPS and demonstrate flexibility of PPS representation beyond the physical and anatomical limits of body representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rather than seeing Zoom as a replacement for practicing movement and dance in a shared physical space, I propose to consider our relationship with the screen on Zoom as a movement in its own right. Using my experience of teaching movement on Zoom, I ask how we can connect with another via the screen without losing awareness of our bodies and the space which we're in. I argue that Zoom is a place of 'moving selfies' in dialogue where we can engage critically with the screen by practicing seeing with the whole body and moving with diffuse awareness and where we can critically reflect on our own habits of framing the world and its biases.

Central nervous system (CNS) sequelae continue to be common in HIV-infected individuals despite combination antiretroviral therapy (cART). These sequelae include HIV-associated neurocognitive disorder (HAND) and virologic persistence in the CNS. Resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) is a widely used tool to examine the integrity of brain function and pathology. In this study, we examined 16 HIV-positive (HIV+) subjects and 12 age, sex, and race matched HIV seronegative controls (HIV−) whole-brain high-resolution rsfMRI along with a battery of neurocognitive tests. A comprehensive data-driven analysis of rsfMRI revealed impaired functional connectivity, with very large effect sizes in executive function, language, and multisensory processing networks in HIV+ subjects. These results indicate the potential of high-resolution rsfMRI in combination with advanced data analysis techniques to yield biomarkers of neural impairment in HIV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates ways in which vision is integrated with other modalities of perception in a manner relevant to a temporally unfolding activity. It will do so by analyzing a single episode extracted from an abdominal palpation conducted on a pregnant woman by a midwife in Japan. The episode forms a “natural experiment” through which one can demonstrate that the integrated visual and tactile perception of an object is organized differently according to the status of the ongoing activity in which it is embedded. Data are in Japanese with English translations.

The intention to send a crewed mission to Mars involves a huge amount of planning to ensure a safe and successful mission. Providing adequate amounts of food for the crew is a major task, but 20 years of feeding astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) have resulted in a good knowledge base. A crucial observation from the ISS is that astronauts typically consume only 80% of their daily calorie requirements when in space. This is despite daily exercise regimes that keep energy usage at very similar levels to those found on Earth. This calorie deficit seems to have little effect on astronauts who spend up to 12 months on the ISS, but given that a mission to Mars would take 30 to 36 months to complete, there is concern that a calorie deficit over this period may lead to adverse effects in crew members. The key question is why astronauts undereat when they have a supply of food designed to fully deliver their nutritional needs. This review focuses on evidence from astronauts that foods taste different in space, compared to on Earth. The underlying hypothesis is that conditions in space may change the perceived flavor of the food, and this flavor change may, in turn, lead to underconsumption by astronauts. The key areas investigated in this review for their potential impact on food intake are the effects of food shelf life, physiological changes, noise, air and water quality on the perception of food flavor, as well as the link between food flavor and food intake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well established that manipulations of low-level stimulus properties unrelated to mass can impact perception of heaviness, the most famous example being the size-weight illusion whereby small objects feel heavier than equally-weighted larger objects. Interestingly, manipulations of high-level cues such as material have also induced weight illusions, highlighting that cognitive expectations alone are enough to create illusory weight differences. Less is known, however, about what type of cognitive expectations can influence perception of heaviness. As labels are often used to signify the heaviness of objects, this study examined whether semantic cues could induce a novel weight illusion. Participants lifted equally-sized and equally-weighted sets of objects labelled as ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ and reported their perceived heaviness both prior to and after lifting. Fingertip forces were also measured to understand how semantic cues may influence sensorimotor prediction. The labels clearly affected pre-lift-off expectations of heaviness. By contrast, we found no effect of these labels on the perceived heaviness of objects, nor on the forces used to grip and lift them on early trials. In other words, we find no evidence that semantic cues affect perception or action enough to induce a novel weight illusion. These findings suggest that the explicit expectations created by the labels did not dominate the implicit expectations created by the equal sizes of the objects, highlighting the segregated nature of cognitive expectations and their variable influences on perception and action.

It is widely accepted that seeing a talker improves a listener’s ability to understand what a talker is saying in background noise (e.g., Erber, 1969; Sumby & Pollack, 1954). The literature is mixed, however, regarding the influence of the visual modality on the listening effort required to recognize speech (e.g., Fraser, Gagné, Alepins, & Dubois, 2010; Sommers & Phelps, 2016). Here, we present data showing that even when the visual modality robustly benefits recognition, processing audiovisual speech can still result in greater cognitive load than processing speech in the auditory modality alone. We show using a dual-task paradigm that the costs associated with audiovisual speech processing are more pronounced in easy listening conditions, in which speech can be recognized at high rates in the auditory modality alone—indeed, effort did not differ between audiovisual and audio-only conditions when the background noise was presented at a more difficult level. Further, we show that though these effects replicate with different stimuli and participants, they do not emerge when effort is assessed with a recall paradigm rather than a dual-task paradigm. Together, these results suggest that the widely cited audiovisual recognition benefit may come at a cost under more favorable listening conditions, and add to the growing body of research suggesting that various measures of effort may not be tapping into the same underlying construct (Strand et al., 2018).

Understanding the multimodal rendering of 3D shapes is becoming an important research topic as multimedia and virtual reality technologies are rapidly advancing. This study is aimed to investigate human perceptibility on the curvature and texture changes of 3D virtual surfaces across modalities, vision and touch. Our interest is to obtain perception data that can be used for 3D watermarking or data compression under a virtual reality environment providing multimodal interactions. For this study, we designed two psychophysical experiments to estimate curvature discrimination and texture detection thresholds on curvature surfaces over three conditions: vision only, touch only, and both vision and touch. The results show that touch is dominant at both discriminating curvature surfaces and detecting surface texture changes on a curved surface. In addition, the sensitivity of the both senses to detect texture changes linearly increases as a curvature value increases. Finally, the vision and touch senses compensate each other when both modalities are available at the same time. The thresholds from the present study can potentially be used as the upper limit for selecting watermark strengths or compression in order to ensure imperceptibility in a 3D visuohaptic multimedia systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding of the brain and the principles governing neural processing requires theories that are parsimonious, can account for a diverse set of phenomena, and can make testable predictions. Here, we review the theory of Bayesian causal inference, which has been tested, refined, and extended in a variety of tasks in humans and other primates by several research groups. Bayesian causal inference is normative and has explained human behavior in a vast number of tasks including unisensory and multisensory perceptual tasks, sensorimotor, and motor tasks, and has accounted for counter-intuitive findings. The theory has made novel predictions that have been tested and confirmed empirically, and recent studies have started to map its algorithms and neural implementation in the human brain. The parsimony, the diversity of the phenomena that the theory has explained, and its illuminating brain function at all three of Marr's levels of analysis make Bayesian causal inference a strong neuroscience theory. This also highlights the importance of collaborative and multi-disciplinary research for the development of new theories in neuroscience. • Bayesian Causal Inference accounts for phenomena ranging from sensation to action. • Bayesian Causal inference is a unifying neuroscience theory. • Bayesian Causal Inference involves competitive structural priors/hypotheses. • Bayesian Causal Inference appears implemented in the brain in a distributed fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perception of external events often depends on integrating different sensory information. Many studies show strong evidence for visual-tactile integrations. Understanding how visual and tactile information are merged together is still a challenging problem. Here, a neural network model was used to investigate the mechanisms underlying visual-tactile interactions. It includes two unimodal areas (visual and tactile, respectively), sending feedforward connections into a downstream bimodal area. The unimodal areas influence each other via two synaptic mechanisms: feedback synapses from the bimodal area and direct reciprocal connections. The network reproduces a variety of visual-tactile interactions: 1) detection of faint tactile stimuli is facilitated by concomitant visual input; 2) tactile spatial resolution is improved by visual information; 3) cross-modal advantages are maximum when poor unisensory information is available (inverse effectiveness); and 4) conflict situations are resolved based on the more reliable sensory cue. The model identifies distinct roles for the feedback and direct synapses: the first are fundamental to improve detection of low-intensity tactile stimuli in cross-modal stimulation, and the second are mostly implicated in visual enhancement of tactile spatial localization and resolution. A better comprehension of how vision and touch interact in the neural systemmay contribute to physiological knowledge, clinical practice, and technological applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that the discipline of art history, as commonly practised, is not equipped to investigate and critically engage with the complex artistic practices which take place after modernism. It is my contention that contemporary art history is still indebted to and follows the modern paradigm of cognition, theory, experience, and indeed art: the paradigm of vision. The influence of this paradigm is obvious in such phenomena as the high estimation of visual (as opposed to, for example, performance or conceptual) arts and the focus on visual aspects of what can never be exclusively 'visual' art. In particular, Panofsky's art historical method can be read as a manifestation of the modern paradigm of vision. As I show by means of the example of Smithson's Spiral Jetty, art after modernism does not let itself be restricted to one sense alone. Spiral Jetty is a complex work; we might even call it a system. Different aspects of this system include the sculpture in the Salt Lake, which Smithson completed in 1970; the 35-minute 16mm film which Smithson made; the essay Smithson wrote about the work; the photographs taken by Smithson and Gianfranco Gorgoni of the work and its creation; the sketches Smithson made in preparation; the performance of the work's creation, and so forth. And this extends beyond the work itself to the whole system of essays, photographs, films, projects and so forth which have been produced in response to the work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]