We are very excited to share that Obleserlab postdoc Sarah Tune has a new paper in Nature Communications. „Neural attentional-filter mechanisms of listening success in middle-aged and older participants“ is our latest and to-date most extensive output of the longitudinal…
Category: Auditory Cortex
New paper in eLife: Erb et al., Temporal selectivity declines in the aging human auditory cortex
Congratulations to Obleserlab postdoc Julia Erb for her new paper to appear in eLife, “Temporal selectivity declines in the aging human auditory cortex”. It’s a trope that older listeners struggle more in comprehending speech (think of Professor Tournesol in the…
AC postdoc Malte Wöstmann scores DFG grant to study the temporal dynamics of the auditory attentional filter
In this three-year project, we will use the auditory modality as a test case to investigate how the suppression of distracting information (i.e., “filtering”) is neurally implemented. While it is known that the attentional sampling of targets (a) is rhythmic, (b)…
New paper in press in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Wöstmann, Schmitt and Obleser demonstrate that closing the eyes enhances the attentional modulation of neural alpha power but does not affect behavioural performance in two listening tasks Does closing the eyes enhance our ability to listen attentively? In fact, many…
New paper in PNAS by Alavash, Tune, Obleser
How brain areas communicate shapes human communication: The hearing regions in your brain form new alliances as you try to listen at the cocktail party Obleserlab Postdocs Mohsen Alavash and Sarah Tune rock out an intricate graph-theoretical account of modular…
New paper by Erb et al. in Cerebral Cortex: Human but not monkey auditory cortex is tuned to slow temporal rates
In a new comparative fMRI study just published in Cerebral Cortex, AC postdoc Julia Erb and her collaborators in the Formisano (Maastricht University) and Vanduffel labs (KU Leuven) provide us with novel insights into speech evolution. These data by Erb et…
New paper in Neuroimage by Fiedler et al.: Tracking ignored speech matters
Listening requires selective neural processing of the incoming sound mixture, which in humans is borne out by a surprisingly clean representation of attended-only speech in auditory cortex. How this neural selectivity is achieved even at negative signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) remains unclear. We show…
New paper in press in the European Journal of Neuroscience: Wöstmann et al demonstrate that the power of prestimulus alpha oscillations directly relates to confidence in pitch-discrimination
What is the mechanistic relevance of neural alpha oscillations (~10 Hz) for perception? To answer this question, we analysed EEG data from a task that required participants to compare the pitch of two tones that were, unbeknownst to participants, identical. Importantly,…