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!
A very fortunate development: The University of Lübeck has been granted a new research building (by recommendation of the Wissenschaftsrat, a pivotal, joint federal- and state-level agency for these matters) .
Jonas Obleser had the privilege to help steer the conceptual stages of this new “Lübeck environment for minds and machines in interaction” (LEMMI – named after no famous cultural icon in particular). See here for the press release by the Wissenschaftsrat; the final say – as usual – will be with the „Gemeinsame Wissenschaftskonferenz“ (GWK) of German federal and state governments, which will convene next in July 2024.
The university came out with a press release just now, and we are all very excited that in the years to come a new, 3.000+ m2 research building worth up to 63 million € might be built on Lübeck campus premises that will cater specifically to the needs of immersive AI-steered environments and all specifics of psychological, computer-scientific and robotic research on human–AI interactions. 
Jonas Obleser has been elected by the German scientific community as one of the new members of the so-called “Fachkollegium” (a select, standing group of review panelists) of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the field of systemic and cognitive neuroscience.
This is an honourable, non-profit additional task that primarily involves suggesting fundings decisions for grant proposals in the field of neuroscience. Here’s to four exciting if work-intense years.
Out now in eLife: Obleserlab stats modelling wiz Sarah Tune together with Jonas has just published a serious statistical piece of evidence on how, in our >N=100 cohort of ageing listeners as funded by the European Research Council, neural signatures of attentive listening and the actual behavioural outcome a listener achieves are not trivially connected, and in fact are not even predictive of one another – when we look at the longitudinal, two-year trajectory that listeners exhibit in both measures over time.
This study (here is a brief eLife digest on it) poses a keystone result to the ERC project “AUDADAPT”, which we now continue with other projects and spin-offs. Many thanks to the large group of Lübeck citizens who continue to support us with their precious time and their brain and behavioural data!
Diese Studie (hier ist eine kurze eLife-Zusammenfassung) ist ein Schlüsselergebnis des ERC-Projekts “AUDADAPT”, das wir nun mit anderen Projekten und Spin-offs fortsetzen. Vielen Dank an die große Gruppe von Lübecker Bürgerinnen und Bürgern, die uns weiterhin mit ihrer kostbaren Zeit und ihren Gehirn- und Verhaltensdaten unterstützen!
A few weeks ago, we had two scientifically very intense days where we retreated to Cornelius Borck’s lovely University outpost in the pittoresque city center of Lübeck (thanks for having us!) and re-visited and re-thought out current and future research agenda. Thanks to all current (and future!) lab members who contributed so thoughtfully to this. I enjoyed it immensely. After a few years without proper lab retreats and now the pandemic behind us, we will certainly do more of this later in the year.
Twenty-twentythree has probably not been our most prolific year in terms of putting out new research findings, which in part is an interesting delayed consequence of the lab close-down/slow-down in the pandemic years. But …
… here we are in autumn 2023 with no less than three fresh findings and perspectives:
First, graduate trainee Frauke Kraus has published in the Society for Neuroscience outlet eNeuro her new findings on how motivational state is able to affect listening behaviour and listening effort (as proxied by pupil dilation).
Second, with our colleagues from the translational psychiatry unit, mainly Christina Andreou and Stefan Borgwardt, Jonas contributed to an umbrella review on the most likely candidate predictors of an individual at risk transitioning into psychosis, in the Journal Translational Psychiatry (a spin-off by the marketing geniuses at Nature Springer) – the umbrella review poses a corollary of our joint work on hallucinations and meta-cognition in normal and aberrant perception (stay tuned for more on that one!).
Not least, a new review and a true collaborative effort from many neuroscience colleagues here at the University of Lübeck led by Nico Bunzeck, we are arguing in Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Reviews that pathological aging might begin in earnest when and if the typical/healthy functional compensation for brain structural decline breaks down. Check it out.
References
- PMID: 38040075. [Open with Read]
- PMID: 37989588. [Open with Read]
- PMID: 37640731. [Open with Read]