Categories
Computational Modelling Media Uncategorized

Jonas has become a mem­ber of the Bern­stein Network

As of today, I am hon­oured to have become a mem­ber of the Bern­stein Net­work Com­pu­ta­tion­al Neu­ro­science.

The Bern­stein Net­work Com­pu­ta­tion­al Neu­ro­science brings togeth­er over 200 research groups and 450 indi­vid­ual sci­en­tists world­wide, facil­i­tat­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion between exper­i­men­tal neu­ro­science, the­o­ret­i­cal mod­el­ing, and com­put­er sim­u­la­tion. Estab­lished in 2004 through fund­ing by the Ger­man Fed­er­al Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion and Research (BMBF), the net­work aims to trans­late the­o­ret­i­cal neu­ro­science into clin­i­cal and tech­ni­cal applications.

Categories
Auditory Neuroscience Papers

New paper in the Euro­pean Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science: Neur­al Effects of Dis­trac­tor Pre­dictabil­i­ty Depend on Load

Out now in EJN: Tro­by Lui, Jonas Obleser, & Malte Wöst­mann show that the lis­ten­ing brain extracts sub­tle sta­tis­ti­cal reg­u­lar­i­ties from a sequence of irrel­e­vant speech items. Pre­dic­tion of dis­trac­tors is not ful­ly auto­mat­ic but depends on the avail­abil­i­ty of per­cep­tu­al and cog­ni­tive resources. We believe that these find­ings help under­stand poten­tial ben­e­fits of pre­dictable dis­trac­tors for goal-direct­ed neur­al pro­cess­ing and its depen­dence on per­cep­tu­al and cog­ni­tive resource limitations.

 

This is the final study of Malte’s DFG project Under­stand­ing the tem­po­ral dynam­ics of the audi­to­ry atten­tion­al fil­ter. PhD can­di­date Max Schulz and Malte are already busy work­ing on the fol­low up project Under­stand­ing cap­ture and sup­pres­sion in audi­to­ry atten­tion. Stay tuned for more insights into the intri­cate dynam­ics of attention!

Categories
Events Uncategorized

The Obleser lab branch­es out

Our lab has con­tin­ued to diver­si­fy con­sid­er­ably and to mature aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly over the last years. With Sarah Tune and Malte Wöst­mann, we have now two senior sci­en­tists who lead teams with­in our group, which I am very proud of. Sarah Tune leads the Cog­ni­tive Mod­el­ling team and Malte Wöst­mann has been lead­ing the Dynam­ics of Atten­tion team for quite a while.

At the bor­ders of our lab prop­er, I am very hap­py that Mohsen Alavash remains affil­i­at­ed with us, although he is now pri­mar­i­ly lead­ing the Lübeck OPM–Magnetoencephalography efforts.

Also, Niels Kloost­er­man oper­ates his research inde­pen­dent­ly in the Depart­ment of Psy­chol­o­gy but I am very hon­oured that he col­lab­o­rates close­ly with us.

See the cur­rent and slight­ly updat­ed lab struc­ture of the Obleser lab | Audi­to­ry Cog­ni­tion group | Chair of Phys­i­o­log­i­cal Psy­chol­o­gy and Research Meth­ods again below.

Here’s to great sci­ence to come! Jonas

 

Categories
Editorial Notes Publications

Jonas Obleser appoint­ed as senior edi­tor for the Jour­nal of Neuroscience

Start­ing Jan­u­ary 1, 2025, Jonas Obleser will serve as a Senior Edi­tor for The Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science. This pres­ti­gious role, ini­tial­ly set for three years with an option to extend, places him at the core of the edi­to­r­i­al team, under the lead­er­ship of renowned Ger­man-Amer­i­can neu­ro­sci­en­tist Sabine Kast­ner (Prince­ton).

As Senior Edi­tor, Jonas will over­see the assign­ment of sub­mit­ted man­u­scripts to review­ing edi­tors and coor­di­nate the peer-review process with experts world­wide. The senior edi­tor issues deci­sions regard­ing the accep­tance, revi­sion, or rejec­tion of sci­en­tif­ic papers.

The Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science ranks among the top five most-cit­ed neu­ro­science jour­nals glob­al­ly. It has pub­lished peer-reviewed research for over 40 years and serves as the offi­cial jour­nal of the Soci­ety for Neu­ro­science (SfN), the largest organ­i­sa­tion ded­i­cat­ed to under­stand­ing the brain and ner­vous sys­tem, with near­ly 37,000 mem­bers in over 90 countries.

Categories
Acoustics Attention Auditory Neuroscience Events Media Neural Filters Publications Speech perception

Mar­tin Orf receives EUHA Award for Out­stand­ing Thesis

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 behav­iour­al process­es behind selec­tive atten­tion in com­plex lis­ten­ing envi­ron­ments. A key find­ing of his research is that the neur­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of attend­ed speech becomes stronger when a com­pet­ing, ignored speech stream is being com­pressed in its dynam­ics (a very com­mon yet ill-under­stood sig­nal pro­cess­ing tech­nique in audio pro­duc­tion and also in hear­ing devices). Martin’s dis­cov­ery could con­tribute to the devel­op­ment of future hear­ing aid algo­rithms and in the refine­ment  of exist­ing ones.

Categories
Editorial Notes Neural dynamics Neural Oscillations Uncategorized

eLife insight on uni­fy­ing brain networks

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. 

 

Categories
Clinical relevance Statistics

New paper out in Sci­ence Advances: Sta­tis­ti­cal con­tri­bu­tions to find­ing a Hepati­tis C vaccine

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.

Categories
Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Clinical relevance EEG / MEG

New paper with the Weisz lab in eLife: Aber­rant per­cep­tu­al pre­dic­tions in Tinnitus

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.”