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Cognitive distraction and measurement noise are two distinct factors that significantly impact the performance of humans and engineering systems. Cognitive distraction occurs when an individual's attention is diverted from a task, while…
We report a noise induced delay of bifurcation in a simple pulse-coupled neural circuit. We study the behavior of two neural oscillators, each individually governed by saddle-node dynamics, with reciprocal excitatory synaptic connections.…
Short-term phonetic accommodation is a fundamental driver behind accent change, but how does real-time input from another speaker's voice shape the speech planning representations of an interlocutor? We advance a computational model of…
Over the past two decades, numerous studies have demonstrated how less predictable (i.e., higher surprisal) words take more time to read. In general, these studies have implicitly assumed the reading process is purely responsive: Readers…
It is known that listeners lose the ability to discriminate the direction of motion of a revolving sound (clockwise vs. counterclockwise) beyond a critical velocity ("the upper limit"), likely due to degraded front-back discrimination.…
The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend…
Our interest was to evaluate changes in fixation duration as a function of time-on-task (TOT) during a random saccade task. We employed a large, publicly available dataset. The frequency histogram of fixation durations was multimodal and…
Why do human languages change at some times, and not others? We address this longstanding question from a computational perspective, focusing on the case of sound change. Sound change arises from the pronunciation variability ubiquitous in…
Listening in noisy environments can be difficult even for individuals with a normal hearing thresholds. The speech signal can be masked by noise, which may lead to word misperceptions on the side of the listener, and overall difficulty to…
The picture-word interference paradigm (participants name target pictures while ignoring distractor words) is often used to model the planning processes involved in word production. The participants' naming times are delayed in the presence…
We explore a method for presenting word suggestions for non-visual text input using simultaneous voices. We conduct two perceptual studies and investigate the impact of different presentations of voices on a user's ability to detect which…
Spatial selective attention is an important asset for communication in cocktail party situations but may be compromised by short-term cognitive fatigue. Here we tested whether an effortful conversation in a highly ecological setting…
Neurons in the central nervous system are affected by complex and noisy signals due to fluctuations in their cellular environment and in the inputs they receive from many other cells 1,2. Such noise usually increases the probability that a…
The noise can stabilize a fluctuating or a periodically driven metastable state in such a way that the system remains in this state for a longer time than in the absence of white noise. This is the noise enhanced stability phenomenon,…
The study of action selection in humans can present challenges of task design since our actions are usually defined by many degrees of freedom and therefore occupy a large action-space. While saccadic eye-movement offers a more constrained…
When searching a target in a natural scene, both the target's visual properties and similarity to the background influence whether (and how fast) humans are able to find it. However, thus far it has been unclear whether searchers adjust the…
We use an extract from an interview concerning gravitational wave physics to show that the meaning of hesitancies within speech are different when spoken and when read from the corresponding transcript. When used in speech, hesitancies can…
Classifying the information content of neural spike trains in a linguistic endeavor, an uncertainty relation emerges between the bit size of a word and its duration. This uncertainty is associated with the task of synchronizing the spike…
Previous work examining the Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis has shown that while information as measured by surprisal metrics is distributed more or less evenly across documents overall, local discrepancies can arise due to…
Effect of noise in inducing order on various chaotically evolving systems is reviewed, with special emphasis on systems consisting of coupled chaotic elements. In many situations it is observed that the uncoupled elements when driven by…