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Author: Jonas

Categories
Auditory Cortex Auditory Perception Cross-Modal Integration EEG / MEG Neural Oscillations Perception

New paper out: Plöchl, Gas­ton, Mer­ma­gen, König & Hair­ston, Sci­en­tif­ic Reports

An arti­cle by our new AC group mem­ber Michael Plöchl from his PhD project in Osnabrück has been accept­ed for pub­li­ca­tion in Sci­en­tif­ic Reports. In their study, Plöchl, Gas­ton, Mer­ma­gen, König and Hair­ston demon­strate that “Oscil­la­to­ry activ­i­ty in audi­to­ry cor­tex reflects the per­cep­tu­al lev­el of audio-tac­tile integration”.

oscillatory_activity

Abstract
Cross-modal inter­ac­tions between sen­so­ry chan­nels have been shown to depend on both the spa­tial dis­par­i­ty and the per­cep­tu­al sim­i­lar­i­ty between the pre­sent­ed stim­uli. Here we inves­ti­gate the behav­ioral and neur­al inte­gra­tion of audi­to­ry and tac­tile stim­u­lus pairs at dif­fer­ent lev­els of spa­tial dis­par­i­ty. Addi­tion­al­ly, we mod­u­lat­ed the ampli­tudes of both stim­uli in either a coher­ent or non-coher­ent man­ner. We found that both audi­to­ry and tac­tile local­iza­tion per­for­mance was biased towards the stim­u­lus in the respec­tive oth­er modal­i­ty. This bias lin­ear­ly increas­es with stim­u­lus dis­par­i­ty and is more pro­nounced for coher­ent­ly mod­u­lat­ed stim­u­lus pairs. Analy­ses of elec­troen­cephalo­graph­ic (EEG) activ­i­ty at temporal–cortical sources revealed enhanced event-relat­ed poten­tials (ERPs) as well as decreased alpha and beta pow­er dur­ing bimodal as com­pared to uni­modal stim­u­la­tion. How­ev­er, while the observed ERP dif­fer­ences are sim­i­lar for all stim­u­lus com­bi­na­tions, the extent of oscil­la­to­ry desyn­chro­niza­tion varies with stim­u­lus dis­par­i­ty. More­over, when both stim­uli were sub­jec­tive­ly per­ceived as orig­i­nat­ing from the same direc­tion, the reduc­tion in alpha and beta pow­er was sig­nif­i­cant­ly stronger. These obser­va­tions sug­gest that in the EEG the lev­el of per­cep­tu­al inte­gra­tion is main­ly reflect­ed by changes in ongo­ing oscil­la­to­ry activity.
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Editorial Notes Job Offers Uncategorized

Wir suchen Post­doc-Ver­stärkung. (In Ger­man for once.)

From autumn on, or at the ear­li­est con­ve­nience, we are look­ing for a new post­doc for the (still fair­ly new) Obleser lab in Lübeck. Please see the job advert here. Dead­line for appli­ca­tions is July 6.
From this par­tic­u­lar posthold­er we hope for some sup­port in our Meth­ods teach­ing as well, there­fore a decent com­mand of Ger­man will be required.

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Uncategorized

Why, hel­lo: new gen­er­a­tion of audi­to­ry cog­ni­tion, new lab, new projector

Final­ly, this is a brief “Hel­lo” from Lübeck, where the new instan­ti­a­tion of the Obleser lab has set up shop:

grupenbild-mit-beamer-(apr-2016)

I took this pho­to at the begin­ning of our jour­nal club ses­sion last fri­day; the wide angle being nec­es­sary to show­case our lat­est addi­tion, the new projector.

From left to right: Michael Plöchl, Malte Wöst­mann, Lorenz Fiedler, Sung-Joo Lim, Mohsen Alavash, Franziska Schara­ta, and Sarah Tune. Not in pic­ture: Sophie Herb­st. Wel­come to Lübeck, everybody!

Categories
Executive Functions Gyrus Angularis Publications Semantics TMS Uncategorized

New paper out: Tune & Asari­dou, Jour­nal of Neuroscience

Our newest mem­ber of the lab, post-­doc Sarah Tune, just pub­lished a review arti­cle in the Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science. The arti­cle appeared in the “Jour­nal Club” sec­tion, where grad­u­ate stu­dents or post-docs are giv­en the chance to write short review pieces.

Now avail­able online:
Stim­u­lat­ing the Seman­tic Net­work: What Can TMS Tell Us about the Roles of the Pos­te­ri­or Mid­dle Tem­po­ral Gyrus and Angu­lar Gyrus?

Sarah and for­mer UCI Brain Cir­cuits col­league Salo­mi Asari­dou com­ment on a recent TMS study by Dav­ey et al. (2015) who inves­ti­gat­ed the role(s) of the mid­dle tem­po­ral gyrus and angu­lar gyrus in the encod­ing and retrieval of seman­tic infor­ma­tion. Sarah and Salo­mi review and dis­cuss some of the fac­tors that lim­it the inter­pre­ta­tion of rTMS-induced behav­ioral changes in seman­tic judge­ment tasks. Con­clud­ing, they argue that a focus on neur­al net­works and mech­a­nis­tic prin­ci­ples is key to under­stand­ing the neur­al imple­men­ta­tion of seman­tic cognition.

Categories
Auditory Cortex Auditory Perception Media Neural Oscillations Papers Publications Uncategorized

New fea­turette in eLife: Tell me some­thing I don’t know

For those inter­est­ed in audi­to­ry cor­tex and how a regime of pre­dic­tions, pre­dic­tion updates and sur­prise (a ver­sion of “pre­dic­tion error”) might be imple­ment­ed there, I con­tributed a brief fea­turette (“insight”, they call it) to eLife on a recent paper by Will Sed­ley, Tim Grif­fiths, and oth­ers. Check it out.
Obleser-elife-Figure

[For those not so famil­iar with it, “eLife”, despite its aes­thet­i­cal­ly ques­tion­able name, pos­es an inter­est­ing and rel­a­tive­ly new, high-pro­file, open-access pub­lish­ing effort by nobel-prize-win­ning Randy Schek­man, for­mer SfN pres­i­dent Eve Marder and others.] 
Categories
Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Auditory Speech Processing Editorial Notes EEG / MEG Executive Functions Neural Oscillations Neural Phase Papers Publications Speech Uncategorized

[UPDATE] New paper in PNAS: Spa­tiotem­po­ral dynam­ics of audi­to­ry atten­tion syn­chro­nize with speech, Woest­mann et al.

Wöst­mann, Her­rmann, Maess and Obleser demon­strate that the hemi­spher­ic lat­er­al­iza­tion of neur­al alpha oscil­la­tions mea­sured in the mag­ne­toen­cephalo­gram (MEG) syn­chro­nizes with the speech sig­nal and pre­dicts lis­ten­ers’ speech comprehension.

Now avail­able online:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/03/18/1523357113

Press release:

https://www.uni-luebeck.de/forschung/aktuelles-zur-forschung/aktuelles-zur-forschung/artikel/aufmerksamkeit-in-wellen-erfolgreich-zuhoeren-im-rhythmus-der-sprache.html

spatiotemporal_dynamics

Abstract
Atten­tion plays a fun­da­men­tal role in selec­tive­ly pro­cess­ing stim­uli in our envi­ron­ment despite dis­trac­tion. Spa­tial atten­tion induces increas­ing and decreas­ing pow­er of neur­al alpha oscil­la­tions (8–12 Hz) in brain regions ipsi­lat­er­al and con­tralat­er­al to the locus of atten­tion, respec­tive­ly. This study test­ed whether the hemi­spher­ic lat­er­al­iza­tion of alpha pow­er codes not just the spa­tial loca­tion but also the tem­po­ral struc­ture of the stim­u­lus. Par­tic­i­pants attend­ed to spo­ken dig­its pre­sent­ed to one ear and ignored tight­ly syn­chro­nized dis­tract­ing dig­its pre­sent­ed to the oth­er ear. In the mag­ne­toen­cephalo­gram, spa­tial atten­tion induced lat­er­al­iza­tion of alpha pow­er in pari­etal, but notably also in audi­to­ry cor­ti­cal regions. This alpha pow­er lat­er­al­iza­tion was not main­tained steadi­ly but fluc­tu­at­ed in syn­chrony with the speech rate and lagged the time course of low-fre­quen­cy (1–5 Hz) sen­so­ry syn­chro­niza­tion. High­er ampli­tude of alpha pow­er mod­u­la­tion at the speech rate was pre­dic­tive of a listener’s enhanced per­for­mance of stream-spe­cif­ic speech com­pre­hen­sion. Our find­ings demon­strate that alpha pow­er lat­er­al­iza­tion is mod­u­lat­ed in tune with the sen­so­ry input and acts as a spa­tiotem­po­ral fil­ter con­trol­ling the read-out of sen­so­ry content.
Categories
EEG / MEG Neural Oscillations Posters Publications

Herb­st & Lan­dau on Rhythms for cog­ni­tion: the case of tem­po­ral processing

In an invit­ed review in Cur­rent Opin­ion in Behav­ioral Sci­ences, Sophie Herb­st and Ayelet Lan­dau (The Hebrew Uni­ver­si­ty of Jerusalem) dis­cuss the role of spon­ta­neous and stim­u­lus-evoked neur­al oscil­la­tions in tem­po­ral processing.

Now avail­able online:

http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1SZuN8MqMiN8Ar

Categories
Editorial Notes Uncategorized

New appoint­ments as Han­dling Edi­tor in “Neu­roim­age” and Asso­ciate Edi­tor in “Jour­nal of Neuroscience”

It’s a great hon­our to have been appoint­ed over the last days to the edi­to­r­i­al board of two high­ly esteemed sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals, “Neu­roim­age” as well as the super-clas­sic “Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science”. I hope I will be able to live up to the expectations.

— J.O.