Howard Nusbaum

Howard Nusbaum
University of Chicago | UC · Department of Psychology

Ph.D.

About

242
Publications
65,794
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11,260
Citations
Additional affiliations
January 1993 - December 2010
University of Chicago
January 1983 - December 1985
January 1979 - December 1980

Publications

Publications (242)
Article
The longstanding view of doctors as scientists has been an emphasis in the MCAT and medical school training. However, the AAMC recommended recognizing the importance of social and behavioral science for medicine. There is also a growing realization that being a smart problem solver and the physician as scientist model emphasizes a cold cognitive pr...
Article
Full-text available
Sensory signals from the body’s visceral organs (e.g. the heart) can robustly influence the perception of exteroceptive sensations. This interoceptive–exteroceptive interaction has been argued to underlie self-awareness by situating one’s perceptual awareness of exteroceptive stimuli in the context of one’s internal state, but studies probing cardi...
Preprint
To produce complex motor behaviors such as speech, the nervous system must accommodate the fact that sensory feedback is delayed relative to actual movements; by most accounts, this is accomplished using an internal model that predicts the current state of the body’s periphery from recent motor system output. Here we show that onsets of events in t...
Preprint
Full-text available
Most research in the behavioral sciences aims to characterize effects of interest using sample means intended to describe the “typical” person. A difference in means is usually construed as a size difference in an effect common across subjects. However, mean effect size varies with both within-subject effect size and population prevalence (proporti...
Preprint
Sensory signals from the body’s visceral organs (e.g. the heart) can robustly influence the perception of exteroceptive sensations. This interoceptive-exteroceptive interaction has been argued to underlie self-awareness by situating one’s perceptual awareness of exteroceptive stimuli in the context of one’s internal state, but studies probing cardi...
Preprint
Sensory signals from the body’s visceral organs (e.g. the heart) can robustly influence the perception of exteroceptive sensations. This interoceptive-exteroceptive interaction has been argued to underlie self-awareness by situating one’s perceptual awareness of exteroceptive stimuli in the context of one’s internal state, but studies probing cardi...
Preprint
Full-text available
Sensory signals from the body's visceral organs (e.g. the heart) can robustly influence the perception of exteroceptive sensations. This interoceptive-exteroceptive interaction has been argued to underlie self-awareness by situating one's perceptual awareness of exteroceptive stimuli in the context of one's internal state, but studies probing cardi...
Article
Full-text available
Our muscles are the primary means through which we affect the external world, and the sense of agency (SoA) over the action through those muscles is fundamental to our self-awareness. However, SoA research to date has focused almost exclusively on agency over action outcomes rather than over the musculature itself, as it was believed that SoA over...
Article
Full-text available
A central assumption in the behavioral sciences is that choice behavior generalizes enough across individuals that measurements from a sampled group can predict the behavior of the population. Following from this assumption, the unit of behavioral sampling or measurement for most neuroimaging studies is the individual; however, cognitive neuroscien...
Preprint
Cognitive scientists differentiate the "minimal self" – subjective experiences of agency and ownership in our sensorimotor interactions with the world – and the "narrative self" that encompasses those beliefs about the self that are sustained over time. However, it remains an open question how these moment-to-moment experiences of minimal selfhood...
Chapter
The first of three volumes, the five sections of this book cover a variety of issues important in developing, designing, and analyzing data to produce high-quality research efforts and cultivate a productive research career. First, leading scholars from around the world provide a step-by-step guide to doing research in the social and behavioral sci...
Article
Cognitive neuroscientists have been grappling with two related experimental design problems. First, the complexity of neuroimaging data (e.g. often hundreds of thousands of correlated measurements) and analysis pipelines demands bespoke, non-parametric statistical tests for valid inference, and these tests often lack an agreed-upon method for perfo...
Article
Most listeners can determine when a familiar recording of music has been shifted in musical key by as little as one semitone (e.g., from B to C major). These findings appear to suggest that absolute pitch memory is widespread in the general population. However, the use of familiar recordings makes it unclear whether these findings genuinely reflect...
Preprint
Full-text available
Our muscles are the primary means through which we affect the external world, and the sense of agency (SoA) over the action through those muscles is fundamental to our self-awareness. However, SoA research to date has focused almost exclusively on agency over action outcomes rather than over the musculature itself, as it was believed that SoA over...
Article
The frequency-following response (FFR) is a phase-locked evoked response recorded at the scalp that directly mirrors the frequency content of acoustic stimuli. While once believed to be primarily of subcortical origin, MEG and EEG research has more recently shown that the FFR originates from multiple subcortical and cortical neural sources (Coffey...
Preprint
Full-text available
Cognitive neuroscientists have been grappling with two related experimental design problems. First, the complexity of neuroimaging data (e.g. often hundreds of thousands of correlated measurements) and analysis pipelines demands bespoke, non-parametric statistical tests for valid inference, and these tests often lack an agreed-upon method for perfo...
Preprint
Most listeners can determine when a familiar recording of music has been shifted in musical key by as little as one semitone (e.g., from B to C major). However, it is unclear how this form of pitch memory relates to absolute pitch (AP) representations, which are based on pitch chroma. This is because listeners could use spectral cues from the famil...
Article
Absolute pitch (AP) is the rare ability to name any musical note without the use of a reference note. Given that genuine AP representations are based on the identification of isolated notes by their tone chroma, they are considered to be invariant to (1) surrounding tonal context, (2) changes in instrumental timbre, and (3) changes in octave regist...
Article
Full-text available
Having good moral character often involves shifting one’s focus of attention from the self to others and the world. Across three studies (N = 605 adults), we found converging evidence that self-transcendent experiences, specifically awe and flow, enabled the expression of wisdom, as captured by wise reasoning and epistemic humility measures. Study...
Article
What leads people to contribute to public life, to strengthen social cohesion, and work to better society? We investigated how co-curricular aspects of college life relate to social cognitive processes foundational for civic virtues and contribute to their development. We examined one widespread type of co-curricular college experience—studying abr...
Preprint
Having good moral character often involves shifting one’s focus of attention from the self to others and the world. Across three studies (N = 605 adults), we found converging evidence that self-transcendent experiences, specifically awe and flow, enabled the expression of wisdom, as captured by wise reasoning and epistemic humility measures. Study...
Preprint
Absolute pitch (AP) is the rare ability to name any musical note without the use of a reference note. Given that genuine AP representations are based on the identification of isolated notes by their tone chroma, they are considered to be invariant to (1) surrounding tonal context, (2) changes in instrumental timbre, and (3) changes in octave regist...
Article
Full-text available
The ability to generalize across specific experiences is vital for the recognition of new patterns, especially in speech perception considering acoustic–phonetic pattern variability. Indeed, behavioral research has demonstrated that listeners are able via a process of generalized learning to leverage their experiences of past words said by difficul...
Article
Full-text available
Emotional intelligence (EI) and wisdom are psychological capacities claimed to be important foundations for positive social interactions, thus promoting human flourishing. Prior theorizations suggest these constructs are related, but there is no empirical evidence for this. Two studies examined the relationship of EI and wisdom, and meta-cognitive...
Article
Full-text available
How does the brain anticipate information in language? When people perceive speech, low-frequency (<10 Hz) activity in the brain synchronizes with bursts of sound and visual motion. This phenomenon, called cortical stimulus-tracking, is thought to be one way that the brain predicts the timing of upcoming words, phrases, and syllables. In this study...
Article
Full-text available
The frequency-following response (FFR) provides a measure of phase-locked auditory encoding in humans and has been used to study subcortical processing in the auditory system. While effects of experience on the FFR have been reported, few studies have examined whether individual differences in early sensory encoding have measurable effects on human...
Article
A fundamental problem in speech perception is how (or whether) listeners accommodate variability in the way talkers produce speech. One view of the way listeners cope with this variability is that talker differences are normalized – a mapping between talker-specific characteristics and phonetic categories is computed such that speech is recognized...
Article
Full-text available
Many human behaviors are discussed in terms of discrete categories. Quantizing behavior in this fashion may provide important traction for understanding the complexities of human experience, but it also may bias understanding of phenomena and associated mechanisms. One example of this is absolute pitch (AP), which is often treated as a discrete tra...
Article
The Chicago Array of Things (AoT) project, funded by the US National Science Foundation, created an experimental, urban-scale measurement capability to support diverse scientific studies. Initially conceived as a traditional sensor network, collaborations with many science communities guided the project to design a system that is remotely programma...
Article
Listeners exposed to accented speech must adjust how they map between acoustic features and lexical representations such as phonetic categories. A robust form of this adaptive perceptual learning is learning to perceive synthetic speech where the connections between acoustic features and phonetic categories must be updated. Both implicit learning t...
Preprint
Full-text available
Interest in wisdom in the cognitive sciences, psychology, and education has been paralleled by conceptual confusions about its nature and assessment. To clarify these issues and promote consensus in the field, wisdom researchers met in Toronto in July of 2019, resolving disputes through discussion. Guided by a survey of scientists who study wisdom-...
Article
Full-text available
Interest in wisdom in the cognitive sciences, psychology, and education has been paralleled by conceptual confusions about its nature and assessment. To clarify these issues and promote consensus in the field, wisdom researchers met in Toronto in July of 2019, resolving disputes through discussion. Guided by a survey of scientists who study wisdom-...
Article
Adjusting to the vocal characteristics of a new talker is important for speech recognition. Previous research has indicated that adjusting to talker differences is an active cognitive process that depends on attention and working memory (WM). These studies have not examined how talker variability affects perception and neural responses in fluent sp...
Preprint
Absolute pitch (AP), also known as “perfect pitch,” is associated with musical training and tonal language experience within a critical period. Evidence for these associations typically involves comparing individuals with and without AP, yet this approach may represent an inappropriate sampling approach if AP is continuously distributed in the gene...
Chapter
Full-text available
School teachers have hundreds of spontaneous interactions with students each hour, requiring frequent decision-making. Often these interactions require social understanding, perspective taking and emotional self-regulation, constructs often identified with wise reasoning and mindfulness. Increasing mindfulness could aid wiser reasoning in addressin...
Article
Full-text available
Absolute pitch (AP), the rare ability to name any musical note without the aid of a reference note, is thought to depend on an early critical period of development. Although recent research has shown that adults can improve AP performance in a single training session, the best learners still did not achieve note classification levels comparable to...
Chapter
When certain groups in society are disparaged and derogated verbally, aggression and violence against the groups can follow. When public figures and political leaders engage in this kind of discourse, there is implicit social licensing of aggressive and violent behavior against these groups. Moreover, the creation of false equivalence of acts and s...
Chapter
One hundred percent. That is the percentage of authors of this volume who believe that the world would be a better place if people more frequently applied wisdom to their interactions with other people and with the world in general. Zero percent. That is the percentage scaled likelihood that people will apply such wisdom, on a regular basis, any ti...
Article
Full-text available
Aims: School teachers have hundreds of spontaneous interactions with students each hour, requiring frequent decision-making. Often these interactions require social understanding and emotional self-regulation, two constructs often identified with wisdom and mindfulness. Increasing mindfulness could aid wiser management of classroom demands. The pre...
Preprint
Intuition and deliberation are two strategies for problem-solving and decision-making. It is commonly believed that deliberation requires more effort than intuition. However, to date, neural evidence approving or disapproving this point is scarce. To explore this issue, we asked participants to play two well-matched games requiring either deliberat...
Article
People across the world seek out beautiful sounds in nature, such as a babbling brook or a nightingale song, for positive human experiences. However, it is unclear whether this positive aesthetic response is driven by a preference for the perceptual features typical of nature sounds versus a higher‐order association of nature with beauty. To test t...
Article
Cognitive neuroscience can be substantially advanced if structured mechanisms are created to increase its social impact and to develop synergies with some currently more distant disciplines that are developing relevant knowledge. We present such opportunities and argue that pursuing these can benefit from establishing a centralized coordinating org...
Conference Paper
The relationship of the acoustic patterns of speech to phonetic categories varies across talkers. A change in talker therefore requires listeners use this relationship which depends on determining the acoustic-phonetic mapping for a new talker. The work from our group has demonstrated that tuning the perceptual system to the acoustic-phonetic syste...
Book
This book presents perspectives from world experts in the field of wisdom studies to propose how wisdom can provide the foundation upon which solutions to social and global problems can be grounded. The authors argue that where society has come to rely on leaders with skills relating to knowledge and intelligence; instead we should focus on wisdom-...
Article
Wisdom has been discussed for centuries in religious and philosophical texts. It is often viewed as a fuzzy psychological construct analogous to consciousness, stress, and resilience. This essay provides an understanding of wisdom as a scientific construct, based on empirical research starting in the 1970s. The focus is on practical rather than the...
Article
Attention restoration theory (ART) posits that stimuli found in nature may restore directed attention functioning by reducing demands on the endogenous attention system. In the present experiment, we assessed whether nature-related cognitive benefits extended to auditory presentations of nature, a topic that has been understudied. To assess directe...
Article
Full-text available
Reconsolidation theory describes memory formation as an ongoing process that cycles between labile and stable states. Though sleep is critical for the initial consolidation of a memory, there has been little evidence that sleep facilitates reconsolidation. We now demonstrate in two experiments that a sleep-consolidated memory can be destabilized if...
Preprint
Full-text available
People across the world seek out beautiful sounds in nature, such as a babbling brook or a nightingale song, for positive human experiences. However, it is unclear whether this positive aesthetic response is driven by a preference for the perceptual features typical of nature sounds versus a higher-order association of nature with beauty. To test t...
Article
Full-text available
Newly encoded, labile memories are prone to disruption during post-learning wakefulness. Here we examine the contributions of retroactive and proactive interference to daytime forgetting on an auditory classification task in a songbird. While both types of interference impair performance, they do not develop concurrently. The retroactive interferen...
Preprint
Full-text available
Absolute pitch (AP), the rare ability to name any musical note without the aid of a reference note, is thought to depend on acquisition during an early critical period of development. Although recent research has shown that adults can improve AP abilities in a brief (60 minute) training session, the best learners in that study still did not achieve...
Preprint
By definition, individuals with absolute pitch (AP) can categorize an isolated musical note with near perfect accuracy without a reference pitch. This definition implies a uniformity of performance across people; however, in reality AP is a complex, multidimensional ability, shaped by both early and recent auditory experiences. In the present study...
Article
Full-text available
Absolute pitch (AP) judgments, by definition, do not require a reference note, and thus might be viewed as context independent. Here, we specifically test whether short-term exposure to particular intonation contexts influences AP categorization on a rapid time scale and whether such context effects can change from moment to moment. In Experiment 1...
Article
Full-text available
Environmental sounds (ES) can be understood easily when substituted for words in sentences, suggesting that linguistic context benefits may be mediated by processes more general than some language-specific theories assert. However, the underlying neural processing is not understood. EEG was recorded for spoken sentences ending in either a spoken wo...
Article
Skill learning depends on retaining memories of skill-use experiences over time. These memories need to be robust against interference and therefore depend on consolidation. Further, skills must generalize beyond the learning experiences to be useful in novel but related situations. We review the role of sleep in the consolidation of skill learning...
Preprint
Full-text available
The psychological benefits of interacting with nature have been discussed for well over a century. More recently, research has begun to assess how interactions with nature specifically may benefit cognition and cognitive development. Attention Restoration Theory (ART) posits that stimuli found in nature may restore directed attention functioning th...
Article
There is debate about how individuals use context to successfully predict and recognize words. One view argues that context supports neural predictions that make use of the speech motor system, whereas other views argue for a sensory or conceptual level of prediction. While environmental sounds can convey clear referential meaning, they are not lin...
Article
Most individuals have reliable long-term memories for the pitch of familiar music recordings. This pitch memory (1) appears to be normally distributed in the population, (2) does not depend on explicit musical training, and (3) only seems to be weakly related to differences in listening frequency estimates. The present experiment was designed to as...
Article
Full-text available
Significance Language comprehension is thought to rely on a combination of specialized and general-purpose neural mechanisms. When people listen to speech, low-frequency oscillations in cerebral cortex ( < 8 Hz) become entrained to quasirhythmic fluctuations in volume. Entrainment of auditory cortex to speech rhythms has been well documented, but i...
Article
Full-text available
In our auditory environment, we rarely experience the exact acoustic waveform twice. This is especially true for communicative signals that have meaning for listeners. In speech and music, the acoustic signal changes as a function of the talker (or instrument), speaking (or playing) rate, and room acoustics, to name a few factors. Yet, despite this...
Chapter
Research on auditory perception often starts from an assumed theoretical framework of bottom-up acoustic signal decoding followed by pattern matching of signal information to memory. Some specific forms of auditory perception such as speech perception are often assumed to be mediated by specialized mechanisms, shaped by evolution to address the cha...
Article
Full-text available
To better understand the cultivation of positive intra- and interpersonal emotions, we examined an argument that some effects of contemplative training result from language processing. We presented participants with loving-kindness language used in kindness-meditation training studies and asked them to rate imagined pain. If loving-kindness languag...
Chapter
There are many examples of parallel representations for other sensory systems: there are multiple somatosensory maps (e.g., Kaas, 2004), visual maps (e.g., Bartels & Zeki, 1998), and auditory maps (e.g., Hackett & Kaas, 2004) in the brain.
Chapter
The study of wisdom as a psychological construct has increased greatly in the past 30 years, with a more recent interest in the investigation of its neurobiological underpinnings. The neuroscience of wisdom has largely been approached from understanding the neurobiology of the components of wisdom, with little focus on how wisdom is represented as...
Article
Full-text available
Significance Trading experience has been shown to reduce the endowment effect, a decision-making bias that distorts market prices and reduces trade. Understanding the mechanisms underlying how experience changes this bias will provide important insights for developing interventions to improve market efficiency. Using functional magnetic resonance i...
Article
Absolute pitch (AP) is the rare ability to name or produce an isolated musical note without the aid of a reference note. One skill thought to be unique to AP possessors is the ability to provide absolute intonation judgments (e.g., classifying an isolated note as "in-tune" or "out-of-tune"). Recent work has suggested that absolute intonation percep...
Article
Full-text available
In this study we sought to explore how experience with specific mental and somatic practices is associated with wisdom, using self-report measures of experience and wisdom. We administered standard surveys to measure wisdom and experience among four groups of practitioners of mental and somatic practices, namely, meditators, practitioners of the Al...
Data
Minimal data file. Comma separated value (csv) file from which all data analyses were performed. (CSV)
Article
Evidence from a range of fields indicates that inventions are often inspired by drawing a parallel to solutions found in nature. However, the cognitive mechanism of this process is not well understood. The cognitive mechanism of heuristic prototype in scientific innovation was tested with 3 experiments. First, 84 historical accounts of important sc...
Article
Full-text available
Theories of speech production and speech perception assume that phonetic categories can be characterized by stable properties. For example, the notion of stable vowel targets is used to organize articulation, and such targets could serve as the acoustic basis for recognizing vowel categories. However, there is substantial variation in the acoustic...
Article
Neural theories of auditory perception often characterize subcortical structures as relay stations by which acoustic input is passively encoded into a representation that can be recognized by cortical networks. However, efferent projections throughout the peripheral auditory pathway (Huffman & Henson, 1990) suggest a corticofugal network consisting...
Conference Paper
Absolute pitch (AP), the ability to label an isolated note without the aid of a reference note, is to some degree trainable in an adult population. Most training studies ask participants to make overt categorization judgments and provide explicit feedback. Here we examined the incidental learning of 4 isolated notes in an interactive multi-modal en...
Article
Full-text available
Absolute pitch (AP) is defined as the ability to label a musical note without the aid of a reference note. Despite the large amounts of acoustic variability encountered in music, AP listeners generally experience perceptual constancy for different exemplars within note categories (e.g., recognizing that a C played on a tuba belongs to the same cate...