Martin Orf is one of three recipients of this year’s EUHA Award for Outstanding Thesis from the European Union of Hearing Acousticians. His thesis, titled “Selective Attention in Multi-Talker Situations: Neural and Behavioral Mechanisms”, offers valuable insights into the neural and behavioral processes behind selective attention in complex listening environments. A key finding of his research is that the neural representation of the target language becomes stronger when the ignored language is more compressed. This discoveryplay a crucial role in the development of new hearing aid algorithms or the enhancement of existing ones.
Obleserlab network-science wiz and designated head of OPM-magnetoencephalography operations in Lübeck, Mohsen Alavash has provided a neat little “insight” (a magazine-like brief article, essentially) in scientific journal eLife, “Brain Activity: Unifying networks of a rhythm”.
In his eLife insight, Mohsen covers a new study on brain-wide beta oscillatory networks and their link to the dopaminergic system. The study emerges from the lab of Julian Neumann, with Meera Chikermane as lead author. Check it out.
The ways of science can be quite long-winded and intricate sometimes:
In such a project, Obleserlab team members Sarah Tune and myself (J.O.) had been making interesting contact with the very remote fields of biochemistry and infectiology, through the lab of Lübeck‘s Thomas Krey and their quite exciting project: Designing a new candidate for an hitherto unavailable vaccine against the Hepatitis C virus; and then going on to test its potency in a series of experiments.
Ultimately, the Obleserlab contributed statistical modelling for these experimental data — The final paper is now out in Science Advances. Sarah and I (J.O.) made it a mission to apply some state-of-the-art linear mixed models and adequate data transforms not commonly used in this kind of work (see screenshot attached.)
Thanks to Kumar and Thomas and all teams involved, for letting us venture far outside of our comfort zone with this intriguing collaborative effort.
Now out in eLife, Lisa Reisinger and Nathan Weisz (Salzburg) with a diverse team including myself (J.O.) show, using state of the art decoding models and a rigorous approach of internal, pre-registered replication, that people living with tinnitus (a chronic and often very distressing auditory “phantom percept”) show altered patterns of predictive auditory processing. Check it out!
The eLife editorial assessment reads like this: “This important work presents two studies on predictive processes in subjects with and without tinnitus. The evidence supporting the authors’ claims is compelling, as their second study serves as an independent replication of the first. Rigorous matching between study groups was performed, especially in the second study, increasing the probability that the identified differences in predictive processing can truly be attributed to the presence of tinnitus. This work will be of interest to researchers, especially neuroscientists, in the tinnitus field.”
Last week, we ventured over to Hamburg (a mere 65 km southeast of Lübeck) and spent a wonderful day with our friendly hosts, the Tobias Donner lab, at the University Clinic Eppendorf (UKE).
It was very inspiring to identify and discuss the many common threads that drive our join interest in perception and decision-making, in fusing computational modelling of behaviour with M/EEG and fMRI data, and in neurophysiological concepts of arousal or excitation/inhibition balance. Stay tuned for more to come from this exciting joint venture with our local neighbours! Thanks, Tobias and team, for having us.
PS. I hope you like my attempts of shooting a proper “boomer selfie”.
Unsere diesjährige Ausgabe des Hör-Newsletter mit einigen Neuigkeiten aus Lübeck und aus unserem Forschungslabor ist da. Viel Spaß beim Stöbern!
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Welcome
We welcome new PhD students in the Obleser lab: Andreja Stajduhar and Max Schulz.
Andreja did her Bachelor’s at York University in Toronto, Canada, where she focused on how individuals perceive faces under different conditions. At the University of Toronto, she focused on understanding how differences in autobiographical memory performance may map onto neuroanatomical differences in the brain. Now, together with Dr. Sarah Tune, she is investigating how perceptual inference changes with age.
Max did his M. Sc. in Biology at the University of Leipzig. During his DFG-funded PhD project under supervision of Malte Wöstmann, he is focusing on questions about capture and suppression in auditory attention.
These two weeks, we have been fortunate to host two superbe guest talks by Philipp Sterzer from Universität Basel and Ayelet Landau from Hebrew University of Jerusalem here at the Center of Brain, Behavior and Metabolism.
Philipp Sterzer spoke of his rich and intruiging body of work showing how the predictive perceiving mind appears to fluctuate between a more externally-oriented, evidence-seeking mode (my words, JO) and a more internally-oriented mode. Philipp’s studies continue to inspire ongoing work here at our lab, and it was a pleasure to hypothesise about the effects of Ketamine on auditory evidence accumulation. Thanks, Philipp!
Ayelet Landau presented us with her fascinating account of how internal, endogenous brain rhythms and external, environmental (or other individuals’ brain) rhythms match up and shape the human experience – with thought-provoking links appearing between the organisation of language, states of consciousness, and not least trait-like differences from one person to another. Thanks, Ayelet!
