East Asians have been found to allocate relatively greater attention to background objects, whereas European Americans have been found to allocate relatively greater attention to foreground objects. This is well documented across a variety of cognitive measures. We used a modification of the Ganis and Kutas (2003) N400 event-related potential design to measure the degree to which Asian Americans and European Americans responded to semantic incongruity between target objects and background scenes. As predicted, Asian Americans showed a greater negativity to incongruent trials than to congruent trials. In contrast, European Americans showed no difference in amplitude across the two conditions. Furthermore, smaller magnitude N400 incongruity effects were associated with higher independent self-construal scores. These data suggest that Asian Americans are processing the relationship between foreground and background objects to a greater degree than European Americans, which is consistent with hypothesized greater holistic processing among East Asians. Implications for using neural measures, the role of semantic processing to understand cultural differences in cognition, and the relationship between self construal and neural measures of cognition are discussed.

Subjective preference tests with a simulated single reflection in an anechoic chamber were conducted in order to get a knowledge of the preferred properties of sound fields. The degree of preference in relation to a long-time autocorrelation function of source signal and the interaural cross correlation of the sound field is discussed here. The preferred time delay gap between the direct sound and the first echo can be determined by the coherence of autocorrelation function and the amplitude of the echo. The preferred echo direction to a listener may be obtained by minimizing the interaural cross correlation which relates to the ’’subjective diffuseness.’’ Results of the autocorrelation function, which was measured with an A-weighting filter, and the interaural cross correlation are presented for several music motifs. convection velocity and wavelength. The vortex strength, convection

The reactions of babies to aircraft noise were studied by means of electroplethysmography (PLG) and electroencephalography (EEG). It was found that the babies whose mothers had moved to the area around the Osaka International Airport before conception (group I) or during the first five months of pregnancy (group II) showed little or no reaction on PLG and on EEG to aircraft noise. In contrast, babies whose mothers had moved closed to the airport during the second half of the pregnancy or after birth (group III or IV) and the babies whose mothers lived in a quiet living area (group V) reacted to the same auditory stimuli. The babies in groups I and II showed differential responses depending on whether the auditory stimuli were aircraft noise or music. Abnormal PLG and EEG were observed in the majority of babies living in an area where noise levels were over 95 dBA. This suggests that the deep sleep of the babies living in such an area was disturbed.

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