To determine the influence of visual information on auditory performance after restoration of hearing in deaf individuals, the ability to segregate conflicting auditory and visual information was assessed in fourteen cochlear implant users with varied degree of expertise and an equal number of participants with PLX-4720 datasheet normal-hearing matched for gender. age and hearing performance. An auditory speech recognition task was administered in the presence of three incongruent visual stimuli (color-shift, random-dot motion and lip movement). For proficient cochlear implant users, auditory performance was equal to that of controls in the three experimental conditions
where visual stimuli were presented simultaneously with auditory information. For non-proficient cochlear implant users, performance did not differ from that of matched controls when the auditory stimulus was paired with a visual stimulus that was color-shifted. However, significant differences were observed between the non-proficient cochlear implant users and their matched controls
when the accompanying visual stimuli consisted of a moving random-dot pattern or incongruent lip movements. These findings raise several questions with regards to the rehabilitation of cochlear implant users. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“The selleck products present study manipulated response procedure in a dichotic emotion recognition task as a means to investigate models of dichotic listening. Sixty-seven right-handed students were presented with dichotic pairs of the words bower, dower, power, and tower pronounced in a tone of sadness,
anger, happiness, or neutrality. They were asked to identify the two emotional tones presented in each pair and completed the Axenfeld syndrome task twice, in two sessions separated by the administration of a handedness questionnaire. Participants completed the task under one of two response procedures. Thirty-four participants responded by crossing out face drawings corresponding to the emotions they perceived among four alternatives on a response sheet, whereas another group of 33 participants circled the corresponding words among four alternatives. Results revealed the expected left ear advantage (LEA) for emotion perception regardless of response procedure. However, the reliability of the LEA was greater with drawings than with words, whereas the magnitude of the LEA was substantially reduced in the second testing session for words when compared to drawings. These findings support a model of memory where the encoding and retrieval of nonverbal auditory material likely take place in the right cerebral hemisphere. Implications of these results for the representation of emotions in memory and models of dichotic listening are discussed. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.