42,464 research outputs found
A critical statistic for channels with memory
Markov chain model for characterizing error sequences in digital channels with memor
Infants segment words from songs - an EEG study
Children’s songs are omnipresent and highly attractive stimuli in infants’ input. Previous work suggests that infants process linguistic–phonetic information from simplified sung melodies. The present study investigated whether infants learn words from ecologically valid children’s songs. Testing 40 Dutch-learning 10-month-olds in a familiarization-then-test electroencephalography (EEG) paradigm, this study asked whether infants can segment repeated target words embedded in songs during familiarization and subsequently recognize those words in continuous speech in the test phase. To replicate previous speech work and compare segmentation across modalities, infants participated in both song and speech sessions. Results showed a positive event-related potential (ERP) familiarity effect to the final compared to the first target occurrences during both song and speech familiarization. No evidence was found for word recognition in the test phase following either song or speech. Comparisons across the stimuli of the present and a comparable previous study suggested that acoustic prominence and speech rate may have contributed to the polarity of the ERP familiarity effect and its absence in the test phase. Overall, the present study provides evidence that 10-month-old infants can segment words embedded in songs, and it raises questions about the acoustic and other factors that enable or hinder infant word segmentation from songs and speech
General anesthesia reduces complexity and temporal asymmetry of the informational structures derived from neural recordings in Drosophila
We apply techniques from the field of computational mechanics to evaluate the
statistical complexity of neural recording data from fruit flies. First, we
connect statistical complexity to the flies' level of conscious arousal, which
is manipulated by general anesthesia (isoflurane). We show that the complexity
of even single channel time series data decreases under anesthesia. The
observed difference in complexity between the two states of conscious arousal
increases as higher orders of temporal correlations are taken into account. We
then go on to show that, in addition to reducing complexity, anesthesia also
modulates the informational structure between the forward- and reverse-time
neural signals. Specifically, using three distinct notions of temporal
asymmetry we show that anesthesia reduces temporal asymmetry on
information-theoretic and information-geometric grounds. In contrast to prior
work, our results show that: (1) Complexity differences can emerge at very
short timescales and across broad regions of the fly brain, thus heralding the
macroscopic state of anesthesia in a previously unforeseen manner, and (2) that
general anesthesia also modulates the temporal asymmetry of neural signals.
Together, our results demonstrate that anesthetized brains become both less
structured and more reversible.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures. Comments welcome; Added time-reversal analysis,
updated discussion, new figures (Fig. 5 & Fig. 6) and Tables (Tab. 1
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