Author: HiWi

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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!

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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.

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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.