Can noise music fans tell us about benignly masochistic art and how sound becomes music? Noise music often includes “non-musical” sounds (electronic static/ feedback/screaming), while both exaggerating features of musicality (excessive monotony/surprise) and/or stripping them away (melody/harmony). Noise enthusiasts’ (N=395) preferences and attitudes about sound and music were recorded. We tested a five factor model using diagonally weighted least squares. Results suggest a good fit of data to the hypothesized model (CFI=0.967; RMSEA=0.043). Noise/music descriptions varied along five dimensions. Noise as: 1-Intentional (“Noise music is different from environmental noise because it requires deliberate compositional and stylistic choices”); 2-Medium (“Environmental noise can be music if used in a certain way”); 3-Art (“Environmental noise is art”); 4-Musical (“Environmental noise can have interesting timbres”); and 5-Pleasurable (“I often find environmental noise beautiful”). Experiencing noise-as-music involves a range of perceptual styles and beliefs about artistic intention.

Both English-speakers whose access to number language is artificially compromised by verbal interference and thePirah ̃a (an Amazonian tribe without exact number words) appear to rely on analog magnitude estimation for representing non-symbolic exact quantities greater than 3. Here, 10 participants with aphasia from stroke performed the same 5 counting tasksfrom these previous studies. Performance was poorest when targets were not visible during response (70% correct) and bestwhen targets were presented as subitizable groups of 2 and 3 (98% correct). Western Aphasia Battery-Revised subtest scoreswere reliably correlated with performance across counting tasks suggesting ways that both speech and naming may contributeto errors. Coefficients of variation for particular tasks, and significant correlations between target magnitude with both errorrate and size across tasks suggests use of analog magnitude estimation for verbally impaired participants. Diverse forms oflanguage impairment may contribute to errors on nonverbal counting tasks.

English-speakers whose access to number language isartificially compromised by verbal interference and the Pirahã(an Amazonian tribe without exact number words) appear torely on analog magnitude estimation for representing non-symbolic exact quantities greater than 3. Here, 16 participantswith aphasia performed the 5 counting tasks from theseprevious studies. Performance was poorest when targets werenot visible during response (70% correct, task 4; 71% correct,task 5) and best when targets were presented as subitizablegroups of 2 and 3 (98% correct, task 2). Western AphasiaBattery-Revised subtest scores correlated with taskperformance, suggesting diverse forms of languageimpairment may contribute to errors. Coefficients of variationfor tasks and significant correlations of target magnitude witherror rate (r 2=.88) and error size (r 2=.87) across tasks suggestparticipant use of analog magnitude estimation. Experimentsinvolving people with aphasia may further refine ourunderstanding of how language and thought interact.

A widely shared view on temporal representation suggests that people conceptualize time metaphorically as a spatial journey from a back (past) location to a front (future) location. This view predicts 1) shorter estimated distances to and better evaluations of front/future than back/past events (an asymmetry); 2) positive correlations between space, time, and evaluation; 3) negative correlations between responses to the front/future and the back/past. In the present study, participants performed a temporal distance task, a time discounting task, and a spatial distance task, all with back/past and front/future versions. Results showed that 1) there was not asymmetry between back/past and front/future in any task; 2) spatial and temporal tasks correlated positively, but they did not correlate with time discounting; and 3) responses toward the front/future and back/past correlated positively (and not negatively) in all three tasks. The results suggest the need to revise the "moving forward view of time".

How might neuroaesthetics move beyond beauty and begin to study meaning? While neuroaesthetics is broadly concerned with the brain’s role in processing art, it has typically focused on perceptual preferences concerning the question of beauty. To cut deeper ontologically the field might consider exploring other basic kinds of meaningful categorical judgments people routinely make about artifacts, including those related to an object’s purpose and status as art. Providing a point of entry for an empirical approach, a methodology is described where participants judge objects (chairs) for higher-order qualities beyond beauty, including functionality, and art-objecthood. Results suggest that artifacts can be used for probing deeper empirical questions concerning the neural basis for aesthetic judgments and object processing. In this manner, we can begin to understand the meaning of art with respect to both its form and function.

Subjective duration estimates are positively related to the magnitude of various non-temporal stimuli (e.g. Xuan et al., 2007). Our study investigated whether temporal and spatial magnitude information conveyed by linguistic stimuli would affect perceived duration in a temporal reproduction task. We used time-related words referring to different exact durations (e.g. second; Experiment 1), and spatial-temporal metaphors (e.g. long), referring to indistinct temporal as well as spatial magnitudes (Experiment 2). In both experiments, participants over-reproduced the shorter target duration (2.4 s) and under- reproduced the longer target duration (4.8 s). In Experiment 1, participants under-reproduced the longer target duration more when they saw “week” in the training and “year” in the reproduction. Yet, we did not observe the same semantic magnitude effect in other word pairs either in Experiment 1 or 2. Overall, we did not find supporting evidence for magnitude information conveyed by language affecting subjective time estimates.