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Wel­come

In the Obleser Lab, we wel­come new PhD stu­dents 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.

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Attention Clinical relevance EEG / MEG Neural Oscillations Psychiatry Speech perception

A busy talk sched­ule at the Obleser lab

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!

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Editorial Notes Events

New research build­ing for the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck: LEMMI is here to stay.

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. 

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Auditory Neuroscience Editorial Notes Grants Uncategorized

Jonas elect­ed and appoint­ed as DFG review panelist

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.

Categories
Ageing Attention Grants Neural dynamics Neural Filters Papers Psychology

New paper in eLife: Brain and behav­iour go sep­a­rate ways in the age­ing listener

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!

Categories
Auditory Neuroscience Editorial Notes Events Psychology Uncategorized

Oble­ser­lab retreat Jan­u­ary 2024

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.

Categories
Ageing Clinical relevance Papers Psychiatry Publications Uncategorized

New papers in autumn 2023:

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

Categories
Ageing Attention Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Computational Modelling fMRI Job Offers Neural Oscillations Speech perception

We are hir­ing: two new PhD train­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties start­ing ear­ly next year!

© az1172/ Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0]

Our two senior researchers, Sarah Tune and Malte Wöst­mann, are hap­py to each announce the open­ing of a three-year PhD posi­tion in the Obleser lab. The posi­tions are part of two recent­ly fund­ed DFG grants, and will fea­ture real­ly excit­ing com­bi­na­tions of behav­iour mod­el­ling and neur­al dynamics!

Sarah’s project will look into how per­cep­tu­al infer­ence changes with age, using speech per­cep­tion as a mod­el sys­tem. It will bring togeth­er behav­iour­al speech per­cep­tion exper­i­ments and func­tion­al neu­roimag­ing, and apply com­pu­ta­tion­al mod­el­ling to link between the two.

For full details, see the offi­cial job ad.

Malte’s project will focus on audi­to­ry atten­tion and its neur­al bases. It will com­bine behav­iour­al and elec­troen­cephalog­ra­phy (EEG) data in younger and old­er adults to inves­ti­gate the neu­ro-cog­ni­tive mech­a­nisms under­ly­ing cap­ture of atten­tion and sup­pres­sion of distraction.

For full details, see the offi­cial job ad.

The appli­ca­tion dead­line (as sin­gle PDF to the email address named in the ad!) is Nov 19, 2023!

Please don’t hes­i­tate to con­tact Sarah or Malte if you have any infor­mal ques­tions about PhD posi­tions and projects. Sarah will also be at APAN and SfN soon, if you feel like chat­ting with her about the position.

We are look­ing for­ward to many inter­est­ing applications!