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Category: Ageing

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Adaptive Control Ageing EEG / MEG Executive Functions fMRI Job Offers

We’ll be hir­ing soon: Post­docs wanted

The research group “Audi­to­ry Cog­ni­tion” (head­ed by Prof. Dr. Jonas Obleser; auditorycognition.com) in the recent­ly estab­lished Depart­ment of Psy­chol­o­gy, Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck, is seek­ing to hire several

Post­doc­tor­al Researchers

start­ing by Jan­u­ary 2016, ini­tial­ly for 3 years, with the option of a 2‑year exten­sion. These posi­tions will fall into the larg­er frame­work of an ERC Con­sol­ida­tor grant “The lis­ten­ing chal­lenge: How age­ing brains adapt” recent­ly award­ed to Jonas Obleser, and will allow the joint devel­op­ment of cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science and psy­cho­log­i­cal research projects tar­get­ing adap­tive con­trol in the audi­to­ry modal­i­ty of mid­dle-aged adults.

[About the ERC project: The audi­to­ry sen­so­ry modal­i­ty pos­es an excel­lent, although under-utilised, research mod­el to under­stand the cog­ni­tive adjust­ments to sen­so­ry change (here termed “adap­tive con­trol”), their neur­al basis, and their large vari­a­tion amongst indi­vid­u­als. Hear­ing abil­i­ties begin to decline already in the fourth life decade, and our guid­ing hypoth­e­sis is that indi­vid­u­als dif­fer in the extent to which they are neu­ral­ly, cog­ni­tive­ly, and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly equipped to adapt to this sen­so­ry decline.]

We are look­ing for cre­ative minds with a PhD degree and a promis­ing track record in cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science, psy­chol­o­gy, physics, or engi­neer­ing. A strong back­ground and inter­est in research meth­ods is desir­able. Pri­or expe­ri­ence with either human neu­ro­science meth­ods (espe­cial­ly advanced EEG and/or fMRI analy­ses) or mod­el­ing of rich data sets (e.g., latent growth mod­el­ing, struc­tur­al equa­tion mod­el­ing) is expected.

The Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck is a mod­ern uni­ver­si­ty spe­cial­iz­ing in Med­i­cine, Com­put­er Sci­ence, Mol­e­c­u­lar Biol­o­gy, Bio­math­e­mat­ics and Med­ical Engi­neer­ing. Inter­na­tion­al­ly renowned research and high stan­dards of aca­d­e­m­ic tutor­ing char­ac­ter­ize the pro­file of the uni­ver­si­ty. A new ded­i­cat­ed research build­ing (Cen­tre for Brain, Behav­iour, and Metab­o­lism; CBBM) hous­ing also the Obleser lab will open in late 2015.

Pay­ment will fol­low salary group E13 TV‑L (full time), if con­di­tions based on Ger­man Pub­lic ser­vice reg­u­la­tions are satisfied.

 

These posi­tions will be announced offi­cial­ly lat­er in autumn 2015, but inter­est­ed can­di­dates should be in touch now with Jonas Obleser, jonas.obleser@uni-luebeck.de

Categories
Ageing Auditory Speech Processing Degraded Acoustics Hearing Loss Media Publications Speech

Quick inter­view for detektor.fm

Based on Malte’s recent J Neu­rosci study, Jonas did a brief inter­view for Ger­man radio detektor.fm today and talked lis­ten­ing effort, dig­i­tal phone lines, noise reduc­tion, and next-gen­er­a­tion hear­ing aids with host Tere­sa Nehm. (In Ger­man only.)

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Ageing Auditory Cortex Editorial Notes Events Grants

ERC Con­sol­ida­tor Grant award­ed to Jonas Obleser

It is with great plea­sure that we can report on a new major grant for the Audi­to­ry Cog­ni­tion group / Obleser lab: In the 2014 call by the Euro­pean Research Coun­cil (ERC), Jonas Obleser has very recent­ly been award­ed an ERC Con­sol­ida­tor grant (for researchers 7–12 years post their PhD), worth 1.97 mil­lion €. The grant has been award­ed to fund a project enti­tled “The lis­ten­ing chal­lenge: How age­ing brains adapt”. The project will last for five years.

Read the offi­cial ERC press release here.

 

NEW-Logo-ERC-OUTLINEadapt-logo-2

Categories
Ageing Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Clinical relevance Degraded Acoustics EEG / MEG Executive Functions Hearing Loss Neural Oscillations Papers Publications Speech

New paper in press in the Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science: Wöst­mann, Her­rmann, Wilsch, & Obleser [UPDATED #2]

Con­grat­u­la­tions to AC PhD stu­dent Malte Wöst­mann for his new­ly accept­ed paper in the Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science!

Wöst­mann M, Her­rmann B, Wilsch A, & Obleser J.

Neur­al alpha dynam­ics in younger and old­er lis­ten­ers reflect acoustic chal­lenges and pre­dic­tive benefits

J Neu­rosci, in press.

Here is the abstract and my favourite fig­ure from Malte’s paper.

Abstract
Speech com­pre­hen­sion in mul­ti-talk­er sit­u­a­tions is a noto­ri­ous real-life chal­lenge, par­tic­u­lar­ly for old­er lis­ten­ers. Younger lis­ten­ers exploit stim­u­lus-inher­ent acoustic detail, but are they also active­ly pre­dict­ing upcom­ing infor­ma­tion? And fur­ther, how do old­er lis­ten­ers deal with acoustic and pre­dic­tive infor­ma­tion? To under­stand the neur­al dynam­ics of lis­ten­ing dif­fi­cul­ties and accord­ing lis­ten­ing strate­gies, we con­trast­ed neur­al respons­es in the alpha-band (~10 Hz) in younger (20−30 years, n = 18) and healthy old­er (60−70 years, n = 20) par­tic­i­pants under chang­ing task demands in a two-talk­er par­a­digm. Elec­troen­cephalo­grams were record­ed while humans lis­tened to two spo­ken dig­its against a dis­tract­ing talk­er and decid­ed whether the sec­ond dig­it was small­er or larg­er. Acoustic detail (tem­po­ral fine struc­ture) and pre­dic­tive­ness (the degree to which the first dig­it pre­dict­ed the sec­ond) var­ied orthog­o­nal­ly. Alpha pow­er at wide­spread scalp sites decreased with increas­ing acoustic detail (dur­ing tar­get dig­it pre­sen­ta­tion) but also with increas­ing pre­dic­tive­ness (in-between tar­get dig­its). For old­er com­pared to younger lis­ten­ers, acoustic detail had a stronger impact on task per­for­mance and alpha pow­er mod­u­la­tion. This sug­gests that alpha dynam­ics plays an impor­tant role in the changes in lis­ten­ing behav­ior that occur with age. Last­ly, alpha pow­er vari­a­tions result­ing from stim­u­lus manip­u­la­tions (of acoustic detail and pre­dic­tive­ness) as well as task-inde­pen­dent over­all alpha pow­er were relat­ed to sub­jec­tive lis­ten­ing effort. The present data show that alpha dynam­ics is a promis­ing neur­al mark­er of indi­vid­ual dif­fi­cul­ties as well as age-relat­ed changes in sen­sa­tion, per­cep­tion, and com­pre­hen­sion in com­plex com­mu­ni­ca­tion situations. 

Screen Shot 2014-12-03 at 13.07.13

Update #2

Ger­man radio broad­cast­er MDR Info did an inter­view & fea­ture on Mal­te’s Exper­i­ment. Check out the stream below:

Ref­er­ences

  • Wöst­mann M1, Her­rmann B2, Wilsch A2, Obleser J3. Neur­al alpha dynam­ics in younger and old­er lis­ten­ers reflect acoustic chal­lenges and pre­dic­tive ben­e­fits. J Neu­rosci. 2015 Jan 28;35(4):1458–67. PMID: 25632123. [Open with Read]
Categories
Ageing Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Degraded Acoustics EEG / MEG Evoked Activity Hearing Loss Papers Psychology Publications Speech

New paper in press: Wöst­mann, Schröger, & Obleser in J Cogn Neurosci

Con­grat­u­la­tion to PhD stu­dent Malte Wöst­mann, who – with Erich Schröger and Jonas Obleser – has a new arti­cle in press at the Jour­nal of Cog­ni­tive Neuroscience

Acoustic detail guides atten­tion allo­ca­tion in a selec­tive lis­ten­ing task

forth­com­ing. We will update you accord­ing­ly as the paper comes online. We will share how­ev­er one of Malte’s fig­ures here as a teas­er: The paper utilis­es a very clas­sic com­po­nent of the evoked poten­tial, the con­tin­gent neg­a­tive vari­a­tion (the CNV; or a close rel­a­tive there­of, see the actu­al paper for dis­cus­sion) to study how old­er and younger lis­ten­ers allo­cate their atten­tion­al resources depend­ing on implic­it cues on to-be-expect­ed lis­ten­ing difficulties.

Screen Shot 2014-10-19 at 19.37.43

Ref­er­ences

  • Wöst­mann M1, Schröger E, Obleser J. Acoustic Detail Guides Atten­tion Allo­ca­tion in a Selec­tive Lis­ten­ing Task. J Cogn Neu­rosci. 2014 Nov 12:1–13. PMID: 25390200. [Open with Read]
Categories
Ageing Auditory Perception Degraded Acoustics EEG / MEG Hearing Loss Neural Oscillations Papers Perception Publications Speech

Strauß strikes again — fron­tiers in Human Neuroscience

It’s only a week ago that we updat­ed you about Antje’s lat­est pub­li­ca­tion at Neu­roIm­age. Today, there is a anoth­er one com­ing in; Antje’s, Mal­te’s & Jonas’ per­spec­tive arti­cle on cor­ti­cal alpha oscil­la­tions is in press at fron­tiers in HUMAN NEUROSCIENCE.

Cor­ti­cal alpha oscil­la­tions as a tool for audi­to­ry selec­tive inhibition

— Strauß, Wöst­mann & Obleser

See abstract
Lis­ten­ing to speech is often demand­ing because of sig­nal degra­da­tions and the pres­ence of dis­tract­ing sounds (i.e., “noise”). The ques­tion how the brain achieves the task of extract­ing only rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion from the mix­ture of sounds reach­ing the ear (i.e., “cock­tail par­ty prob­lem”) is still open. In anal­o­gy to recent find­ings in vision, we pro­pose cor­ti­cal alpha (~10 Hz) oscil­la­tions mea­sur­able using M/EEG as a piv­otal mech­a­nism to selec­tive­ly inhib­it the pro­cess­ing of noise to improve audi­to­ry selec­tive atten­tion to task-rel­e­vant sig­nals. We review ini­tial evi­dence of enhanced alpha activ­i­ty in selec­tive lis­ten­ing tasks, sug­gest­ing a sig­nif­i­cant role of alpha-mod­u­lat­ed noise sup­pres­sion in speech. We dis­cuss the impor­tance of dis­so­ci­at­ing between noise inter­fer­ence in the audi­to­ry periph­ery (i.e., ener­getic mask­ing) and noise inter­fer­ence with more cen­tral cog­ni­tive aspects of speech pro­cess­ing (i.e., infor­ma­tion­al mask­ing). Final­ly, we point out the adverse effects of age-relat­ed hear­ing loss and/or cog­ni­tive decline on audi­to­ry selec­tive inhi­bi­tion. With this per­spec­tive arti­cle, we set the stage for future stud­ies on the inhibito­ry role of alpha oscil­la­tions for speech pro­cess­ing in chal­leng­ing lis­ten­ing situations.

Ref­er­ences

  • Strauß A1, Wöst­mann M2, Obleser J1. Cor­ti­cal alpha oscil­la­tions as a tool for audi­to­ry selec­tive inhi­bi­tion. Front Hum Neu­rosci. 2014 May 28;8:350. PMID: 24904385. [Open with Read]
Categories
Ageing Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Speech Processing Clinical relevance Degraded Acoustics Executive Functions fMRI Hearing Loss Noise-Vocoded Speech Papers Publications Speech

New paper in press: Erb & Obleser, Fron­tiers in Sys­tems Neuroscience

Julia Erb just got accept­ed the third study of her PhD project,

Upreg­u­la­tion of cog­ni­tive con­trol net­works in old­er adults’ speech comprehension

It will appear in Fron­tiers in Sys­tems Neu­ro­science soon.

The data are an exten­sion (in old­er adults) of Julia’s Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science paper ear­li­er this year.

Ref­er­ences

  • Erb J, Obleser J. Upreg­u­la­tion of cog­ni­tive con­trol net­works in old­er adults’ speech com­pre­hen­sion. Front Syst Neu­rosci. 2013 Dec 24;7:116. PMID: 24399939. [Open with Read]