Author: Jonas

Categories
Clinical relevance Computational Modelling Grants Neural dynamics Voice

Hooray! The Col­lab­o­ra­tive Research Grant “Foun­da­tions of Cir­ca­di­ane Med­i­cine” is here (to stay).

Very hap­py that our lab will be part of the new DFG-fund­ed Col­lab­o­ra­tive Research Cen­tre („Son­der­forschungs­bere­ich“, SFB) Tran­sre­gio 418 between the Char­ité Berlin and Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck, spear­head­ed by chrono­bi­ol­o­gy wiz­ards Achim Kramer (Berlin) and Hen­rik Oster (Lübeck) — “Foun­da­tions of Cir­ca­di­an Med­i­cine”.

A CRC/SFB col­lects about 15 projects, cen­tral funds, and many prin­ci­pal inves­ti­ga­tors from both loca­tions, and will fund a whole new gen­er­a­tion of researchers at the verge of med­i­cine,  neu­ro­science, and sys­tems biol­o­gy for ini­tial­ly 4 years. A CRC/SFB can exist up to 12 years in total.

Our lab will run, joint­ly with Hen­rik Oster, an ambi­tious study on Ket­a­mine and its inter­ac­tions with the inter­nal clock and endocrine (esp. glu­co­cor­ti­coid) sys­tem of the human body, with the ulti­mate goal of under­stand­ing bet­ter how and why Ket­a­mine can exert its ben­e­fi­cial effects on mood.

Stay tuned for more, and con­grat­u­la­tions to all involved!

Categories
Auditory Perception Clinical relevance Degraded Acoustics Effort Executive Functions Hearing Loss Papers Perception Psychology Speech perception Uncategorized

New paper in Trends in Hear­ing: Hear­ing aids add a demon­stra­ble amount of cog­ni­tive burden

A true Hoer­hanse col­labo: Markus Kem­per and our col­leagues from the Deutsche Hörg­eräte Insti­tut (DHI) show, with Jonas’ help, and using data acquired in our lab, that hear­ing aids do take their how­ev­er slight toll on the cog­ni­tive system: 

Despite the unques­tion­ably great help that hear­ing devices do pro­vide to those with impaired hear­ing, the tech­ni­cal noise and dig­i­tal sig­nal pro­cess­ing chain of hear­ing aids do ampli­fy mea­sur­ably the typ­i­cal sig­na­tures of effort­ful listening.

Espe­cial­ly the pupil dila­tion, hall­mark of increased locus coeruleus/noradrenergic activ­i­ty in response to sensory–cognitive chal­lenges, is notably more pro­nounced when lis­ten­ers respond to a stan­dard speech-intell­gi­bil­i­ty test (OLSA) while lis­ten­ing through a “trans­par­ent” (i.e., switched-on, but not ampli­fy­ing) hear­ing aid.

Out now in Trends in Hear­ing.

Categories
Adaptive Control EEG / MEG Evoked Activity Linguistics Neural dynamics Papers Semantics Uncategorized

New paper in Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science: Mamash­li et al.

Jonas col­lab­o­rat­ed with for­mer Max Planck col­leagues and the Mari­nos Imag­ing Cen­ter at Har­vard (first author Fahimeh Mamash­li) on a re-analy­sis of a sim­ple speech/language par­a­digm.

In this new paper out now in J Neu­rosci, Fahimeh shows that activ­i­ty in the infe­ri­or frontal gyrus (IFG) doesn’t just respond to meaning—it pre­dicts it. Using machine learn­ing, we demon­strate that IFG activ­i­ty can fore­cast future activ­i­ty in the supe­ri­or and mid­dle tem­po­ral gyri dur­ing the N400 win­dow, a key neur­al mark­er of seman­tic pro­cess­ing. This pro­vides rare, arguably causal, evi­dence for feed­back from frontal to tem­po­ral areas, sup­port­ing dynam­ic, bidi­rec­tion­al mod­els of lan­guage comprehension.

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
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
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.