Categories
Adaptive Control Ageing Job Offers Speech Uncategorized

Want to come work with us?

Post­doc posi­tion in the Obleser lab, in the ERC-fund­ed project “Audadapt” — dead­line for appli­ca­tions very soon! (Nov 30 2017). Check out all appli­ca­tions details here!

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Uncategorized

SNAP 2017 — Timetable now online!

SNAP 2017 is draw­ing clos­er. Get ready and take a look at the program:

Day 1: 08.12.2017
Time
08:00 — 09:10 Reg­is­tra­tion / Open­ing remarks
(9:00–9:10)
09:10 — 10:00 Edmund Lalor
10:00 — 10:50 Sarah Ver­hulst
10:50 — 11:10 Cof­fee break
11:10 — 12:00 Christoph Kayser
12:00 — 12:30 Dis­cus­sion (Impuls­es by Son­ja Kotz)
12:30 — 14:00 Lunch
14:00 — 14:50 Tom Fran­cart
14:50 — 15:40 Nima Mes­garani
15:40 — 16:00 Cof­fee break
16:00 — 18:00 Posters and beers
19:00 Speak­ers Din­ner at Bud­dha Bowl
21:00 SNAP Par­ty at Gang 56
Day 2: 09.12.2017
Time
09:30 — 10:20 Jen­nifer Bizley
10:20 — 11:10 Sami­ra Anderson
11:10 — 11:30 Cof­fee break
11:30 — 12:20 Maria Chait
12:20 — 12:50 Dis­cus­sion (Impuls­es by Thomas Münte)
13:00 — 14:00 Lunch
14:00 — 14:50 Josh McDer­mott
14:50 — 15:30 Round-table / Wrap-up
Categories
Ageing Attention Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Editorial Notes EEG / MEG Executive Functions Neural Phase Posters

Come see us @ Neu­ro­science 2017 in DC

Will be at the Soci­ety for Neu­ro­science Meet­ing next week in DC? Come find us in the Wednes­day after­noon ses­sion with a bunch of (we think) very cool atten­tion-relat­ed posters (Poster boards UU42UU46):

804.06. Audi­to­ry atten­tion and pre­dic­tive pro­cess­ing co-mod­u­late speech com­pre­hen­sion in mid­dle-aged adults
*S. TUNE, M. WÖSTMANN, J. OBLESER;

804.05. Implic­it tem­po­ral pre­dictabil­i­ty enhances audi­to­ry pitch-dis­crim­i­na­tion sensitivity
*S. K. HERBST, M. PLÖCHL, A. HERRMANN, J. OBLESER;

804.09. Are visu­al and audi­to­ry detec­tion per­for­mance dri­ven by a supramodal atten­tion­al rhythm?
*M. PLOECHL, S. KASTNER, I. C. FIEBELKORN, J. OBLESER;

804.08. Spa­tio-tem­po­ral expec­ta­tions exert dif­fer­en­tial effects on visu­al and audi­to­ry discrimination
*A. WILSCH, J. OBLESER, C. E. SCHROEDER, C. S. HERRMANN, S. HAEGENS

804.07. Tran­scra­nial 10-Hz stim­u­la­tion but also eye clo­sure mod­u­late audi­to­ry attention
*M. WÖSTMANN, L.-M. SCHMITT, J. VOSSKUHL, C. S. HERRMANN, J. OBLESER

Categories
Attention Auditory Neuroscience EEG / MEG Evoked Activity Neural Oscillations Neural Phase Papers Perception Psychology Uncategorized

New paper in Plos Biol­o­gy: Com­ment by Obleser, Hen­ry, & Lakatos

My col­leagues and col­lab­o­ra­tor Peter Lakatos and Mol­ly Hen­ry and I took to our desks and Mat­lab con­soles, when Assaf Bres­ka and Leon Deouell came out ear­li­er this year with their paper in Plos Biology.

We had a few things to say about what we then per­ceived as a rather pes­simistic assess­ment of neur­al entrain­ment. How­ev­er, since then a great and quite fru­ti­ful dis­cus­sion has emerged, now pub­lished in Plos Biology:

Obleser J, Hen­ry, MJ, & Lakatos, P. What do we talk about when we talk about rhythm?, Plos Biol­o­gy 2017

Mean­while, Bres­ka and Deouell added some more behav­iour­al data and replied to us (now also pub­lished).

— Enjoy!

 

Categories
Events Probandensuche Publications

Audi­to­ry cog­ni­tion newsletter

Come and see our very first audi­to­ry cog­ni­tion newslet­ter. From now on we want to present impres­sions of our lat­est work and results twice a year. In the inter­view sec­tion you also have the chance to learn more about our members. 

Please note: As the newslet­ter also reach­es our par­tic­i­pants it is writ­ten in german.

Categories
Events

SNAP2017 draw­ing closer!

Save your slot at the SNAP2017 work­shop in Lübeck (Decem­ber 8–9). Reg­is­tra­tion is avail­able at snap.obleserlab.com and will end soon! A first line-up is already live. Sub­mis­sion dead­line for the Posters will be July 31st, accep­tance noti­fi­ca­tions will be sent out in August 2017.

The work­shop will bring togeth­er, for two days of sci­ence, about 12 inter­na­tion­al speak­ers on neu­ro­science, psy­chophysics and engi­neer­ing per­spec­tives on pro­cess­ing degrad­ed sound and speech.

© az1172/ Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0]
Categories
Adaptive Control Ageing Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience EEG / MEG Evoked Activity Executive Functions Neural Oscillations Neural Phase Papers Perception Publications

New paper in press: Hen­ry et al., Nature Communications

Here comes a new paper in Nature Com­mu­ni­ca­tions by for­mer AC post­doc Mol­ly Hen­ry, with for­mer fel­low post­doc AC alum­nus Björn Her­rmann, our tire­less lab man­ag­er, Dun­ja Kunke, and myself! It is a late (to us quite impor­tant) result from our lab’s tenure at the Max Planck in Leipzig, 

Hen­ry, M.J., Her­rmann, B., Kunke, D., Obleser, J. (In press). Aging affects the bal­ance of neur­al entrain­ment and top-down neur­al mod­u­la­tion in the lis­ten­ing brain. Nature Communications. 

—Con­grat­u­la­tions, Molly!

Categories
Attention Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Speech Processing EEG / MEG Papers Psychology Publications

New paper in press in Jour­nal of Neur­al Engi­neer­ing: Fiedler et al. on in-ear-EEG and the focus of audi­to­ry attention

Towards a brain-con­trolled hear­ing aid: PhD stu­dent Lorenz Fiedler shows how attend­ed and ignored audi­to­ry streams are dif­fer­ent­ly rep­re­sent­ed in the neur­al respons­es and how the focus of audi­to­ry atten­tion can be extract­ed from EEG sig­nals record­ed at elec­trodes placed inside the ear-canal and around the ear.

Abstract
Objec­tive. Con­ven­tion­al, mul­ti-chan­nel scalp elec­troen­cephalog­ra­phy (EEG) allows the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the attend­ed speak­er in con­cur­rent-lis­ten­ing (‘cock­tail par­ty’) sce­nar­ios. This implies that EEG might pro­vide valu­able infor­ma­tion to com­ple­ment hear­ing aids with some form of EEG and to install a lev­el of neu­ro-feed­back. Approach. To inves­ti­gate whether a listener’s atten­tion­al focus can be detect­ed from sin­gle-chan­nel hear­ing-aid-com­pat­i­ble EEG con­fig­u­ra­tions, we record­ed EEG from three elec­trodes inside the ear canal (‘in-Ear-EEG’) and addi­tion­al­ly from 64 elec­trodes on the scalp. In two dif­fer­ent, con­cur­rent lis­ten­ing tasks, par­tic­i­pants ( n  =  7) were fit­ted with indi­vid­u­al­ized in-Ear-EEG pieces and were either asked to attend to one of two dichot­i­cal­ly-pre­sent­ed, con­cur­rent tone streams or to one of two diot­i­cal­ly-pre­sent­ed, con­cur­rent audio­books. A for­ward encod­ing mod­el was trained to pre­dict the EEG response at sin­gle EEG chan­nels. Main results. Each indi­vid­ual par­tic­i­pants’ atten­tion­al focus could be detect­ed from sin­gle-chan­nel EEG response record­ed from short-dis­tance con­fig­u­ra­tions con­sist­ing only of a sin­gle in-Ear-EEG elec­trode and an adja­cent scalp-EEG elec­trode. The dif­fer­ences in neur­al respons­es to attend­ed and ignored stim­uli were con­sis­tent in mor­phol­o­gy (i.e. polar­i­ty and laten­cy of com­po­nents) across sub­jects. Sig­nif­i­cance. In sum, our find­ings show that the EEG response from a sin­gle-chan­nel, hear­ing-aid-com­pat­i­ble con­fig­u­ra­tion pro­vides valu­able infor­ma­tion to iden­ti­fy a listener’s focus of attention.