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Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception EEG / MEG Neural Oscillations Neural Phase Papers Perception Publications

New paper in press: Her­rmann, Hen­ry, Grigutsch & Obleser, The Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science [Update]

Oscil­la­to­ry Phase Dynam­ics in Neur­al Entrain­ment Under­pin Illu­so­ry Per­cepts of Time

Nat­ur­al sounds like speech and music inher­ent­ly vary in tem­po over time. Yet, con­tex­tu­al fac­tors such as vari­a­tions in the sound’s loud­ness or pitch influ­ence per­cep­tion of tem­po­ral rate change towards slow­ing down or speed­ing up.

A new MEG study by Björn Her­rmann, Mol­ly Hen­ry, Maren Grigutsch and Jonas Obleser asked for the neur­al oscil­la­to­ry dynam­ics that under­pin con­text-induced illu­sions in tem­po­ral rate change and found illu­so­ry per­cepts to be linked to changes in the neur­al phase pat­terns of entrained oscil­la­tions while the exact fre­quen­cy of the oscil­la­to­ry response was relat­ed to veridi­cal percepts.

The paper is in press and forth­com­ing in The Jour­nal of Neuroscience.

 

Update:

Paper is avail­able online.

Ref­er­ences

  • Her­rmann B, Hen­ry MJ, Grigutsch M, Obleser J. Oscil­la­to­ry phase dynam­ics in neur­al entrain­ment under­pin illu­so­ry per­cepts of time. J Neu­rosci. 2013 Oct 2;33(40):15799–809. PMID: 24089487. [Open with Read]
Categories
Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Clinical relevance EEG / MEG Evoked Activity Hearing Loss Papers Psychology Publications

New paper in press: Her­rmann et al., Hear­ing Research [Update]

Audi­to­ry fil­ter width affects response mag­ni­tude but not fre­quen­cy speci­fici­ty in audi­to­ry cortex

This is fan­tas­tic news on a fri­day morn­ing: Obleser lab Post­doc Björn Her­rmann teamed up with his fel­low Post­docs Math­ias Scharinger and Mol­ly Hen­ry to study how spec­tral analy­sis in the audi­to­ry periph­ery (termed fre­quen­cy selec­tiv­i­ty) relates to pro­cess­ing in audi­to­ry cor­tex (termed fre­quen­cy speci­fici­ty; see also Björns paper in J Neu­ro­phys­i­ol 2013).

Giv­ing this an age­ing and hear­ing loss per­spec­tive and build­ing on the con­cept of audi­to­ry fil­ters in the cochlea (Moore et al.), Björn found that  the over­all N1 ampli­tude of lis­ten­ers, but not their fre­quen­cy-spe­cif­ic neur­al adap­ta­tion pat­terns, is cor­re­lat­ed with the pass-band of the audi­to­ry filter.

This sug­gests that widened audi­to­ry fil­ters are com­pen­sat­ed for by a response gain in fre­quen­cy-spe­cif­ic areas of audi­to­ry cor­tex; the paper is in press and forth­com­ing in Hear­ing Research.

 

Update:

Paper is avail­able online.

Ref­er­ences

  • Her­rmann B, Hen­ry MJ, Scharinger M, Obleser J. Audi­to­ry fil­ter width affects response mag­ni­tude but not fre­quen­cy speci­fici­ty in audi­to­ry cor­tex. Hear Res. 2013 Oct;304:128–36. PMID: 23876524. [Open with Read]
Categories
Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Auditory Speech Processing Degraded Acoustics Executive Functions fMRI Noise-Vocoded Speech Papers Perception Publications Speech

New paper out: Erb, Hen­ry, Eis­ner & Obleser — Jour­nal of Neuroscience

We are proud to announce that PhD stu­dent Julia Erb just came out with a paper issued in Jour­nal  of Neu­ro­science:

The Brain Dynam­ics of Rapid Per­cep­tu­al Adap­ta­tion to Adverse Lis­ten­ing Conditions

Effects of adaptation

Grab it here:

Abstract:

Lis­ten­ers show a remark­able abil­i­ty to quick­ly adjust to degrad­ed speech input. Here, we aimed to iden­ti­fy the neur­al mech­a­nisms of such short-term per­cep­tu­al adap­ta­tion. In a sparse-sam­pling, car­diac-gat­ed func­tion­al mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing (fMRI) acqui­si­tion, human lis­ten­ers heard and repeat­ed back 4‑band-vocod­ed sentences 

Ref­er­ences

  • Erb J, Hen­ry MJ, Eis­ner F, Obleser J. The brain dynam­ics of rapid per­cep­tu­al adap­ta­tion to adverse lis­ten­ing con­di­tions. J Neu­rosci. 2013 Jun 26;33(26):10688–97. PMID: 23804092. [Open with Read]
Categories
Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience EEG / MEG Papers Publications

New paper out: Her­rmann, Hen­ry, and Obleser in Jour­nal of Neurophysiology

In this study (avail­able online)

Fre­quen­cy-spe­cif­ic adap­ta­tion in human audi­to­ry cor­tex depends on the spec­tral vari­ance in the acoustic stimulation

we show that adap­ta­tion of neur­al respons­es in human audi­to­ry cor­tex to acoustic stim­u­la­tion is not fixed. Instead, the degree of co-adap­ta­tion in these tono­topi­cal­ly orga­nized brain regions varies (widens/tightens) with the spec­tral prop­er­ties of the acoustic stim­u­la­tion. We relate this to sen­so­ry mem­o­ry process­es and short-term plas­tic­i­ty which allows for the neur­al sys­tem to adjust to the acoustic prop­er­ties in the environment.

Ref­er­ences

  • Her­rmann B, Hen­ry MJ, Obleser J. Fre­quen­cy-spe­cif­ic adap­ta­tion in human audi­to­ry cor­tex depends on the spec­tral vari­ance in the acoustic stim­u­la­tion. J Neu­ro­phys­i­ol. 2013 Apr;109(8):2086–96. PMID: 23343904. [Open with Read]
Categories
Auditory Cortex Auditory Speech Processing fMRI Papers Publications Speech

New paper out: McGet­ti­gan et al., Neuropsychologia


Last years’s lab guest and long-time col­lab­o­ra­tor Car­olyn McGet­ti­gan has put out anoth­er one:

Speech com­pre­hen­sion aid­ed by mul­ti­ple modal­i­ties: Behav­iour­al and neur­al interactions

I had the plea­sure to be involved ini­tial­ly, when Car­olyn con­ceived a lot of this, and when things came togeth­er in the end. Car­olyn nice­ly demon­strates how vary­ing audio and visu­al clar­i­ty comes togeth­er with the seman­tic ben­e­fits a lis­ten­er can get from the famous Kalikow SPIN (speech in noise) sen­tences. The data high­light pos­te­ri­or STS and the fusiform gyrus as sites for con­ver­gence of audi­to­ry, visu­al and lin­guis­tic information.

Check it out!

Ref­er­ences

  • McGet­ti­gan C, Faulkn­er A, Altarel­li I, Obleser J, Baver­stock H, Scott SK. Speech com­pre­hen­sion aid­ed by mul­ti­ple modal­i­ties: behav­iour­al and neur­al inter­ac­tions. Neu­ropsy­cholo­gia. 2012 Apr;50(5):762–76. PMID: 22266262. [Open with Read]
Categories
Auditory Cortex EEG / MEG Evoked Activity Linguistics Papers Publications

New Paper out: HELLO? in press (Neu­roIm­age)

Pho­net­ic cues instan­ta­neous­ly mapped onto dialec­tal cat­e­gories appear to be extract­ed at ear­ly moments in audi­to­ry speech per­cep­tion, as we try to show in our paper

You had me at “Hel­lo”: Rapid extrac­tion of dialect infor­ma­tion from spo­ken words

to appear in Neu­roIm­age (Math­ias Scharinger, Philip Mon­a­han, William Idsardi).

In a mod­i­fied pas­sive odd­ball design, we com­pare the Mis­match Neg­a­tiv­i­ty (MMN) to deviants in one Amer­i­can Eng­lish dialect (Stan­dard Amer­i­can Eng­lish or African-Amer­i­can Ver­nac­u­lar Eng­lish) to the stan­dards of the respec­tive oth­er dialect. In a con­trol con­di­tion, deviants with­in the same dialects have the same aver­aged acoustic dis­tance to their stan­dards than the cross-dialec­tal aver­aged acoustic dis­tance. Stan­dards and deviants were always spo­ken exem­plars of ‘Hel­lo’ in both dialects (ca. 500 ms). MMN effects are sig­nif­i­cant in the cross-dialec­tal con­di­tion only, imply­ing that a pure acoustic stan­dard-deviant dis­tance is not suf­fi­cient to elic­it sub­stan­tial mis­match effects. We inter­pret these find­ings, togeth­er with N1m source local­iza­tion data, as evi­dence for a rapid extrac­tion of dialect infor­ma­tion via salient acoustic-pho­net­ic cues. From the loca­tion and ori­en­ta­tion of the N1m source activ­i­ty, we can infer that dialect switch­es from stan­dards to deviants engage areas in supe­ri­or tem­po­ral sulcus/gyrus.

Ref­er­ences

  • Scharinger M, Mon­a­han PJ, Idsar­di WJ. You had me at “Hel­lo”: Rapid extrac­tion of dialect infor­ma­tion from spo­ken words. Neu­roim­age. 2011 Jun 15;56(4):2329–38. PMID: 21511041. [Open with Read]
Categories
Auditory Cortex EEG / MEG Evoked Activity Papers Place of Articulation Features Publications

New Paper out: Com­pre­hen­sive map of a language’s vow­el space

We are glad to announce that our paper (Math­ias Scharinger, Saman­tha Poe, & William Idsar­di) on cor­ti­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Turk­ish vow­els is in press in Jour­nal of Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science. In this paper, we extend pre­vi­ous meth­ods of obtain­ing cen­ters of cor­ti­cal activ­i­ty evoked by vow­el exem­plars (e.g. Obleser et al., 2003, on Ger­man) and pro­vide an N1m ECD (Equiv­a­lent Cur­rent Dipole) map of the entire vow­el space of Turk­ish. Intrigu­ing­ly, ECD loca­tions mapped near­ly per­fect to loca­tions in F2/F1 space, although our mod­el com­par­i­son sug­gest­ed that inclu­sion of dis­crete fea­ture based pre­dic­tors for both loca­tions as well as col­lo­ca­tions of vow­els in audi­to­ry cor­tex improves the mod­el fits sub­stan­tial­ly. We dis­cuss the find­ings on the back­ground of neur­al cod­ing schemes for speech-relat­ed audi­to­ry categories.

Fig­ure 1: Loca­tions of Turk­ish vow­el stim­uli in acoustic space (F1,F2, top pan­el) and N1m ECD loca­tions in cor­ti­cal space (lat­er­al-medi­al/an­te­ri­or-pos­te­ri­or/in­fe­ri­or-supe­ri­or, bot­tom panel).

UPDATE: Paper is avail­able here.

Ref­er­ences

  • Scharinger M, Idsar­di WJ, Poe S. A com­pre­hen­sive three-dimen­sion­al cor­ti­cal map of vow­el space. J Cogn Neu­rosci. 2011 Dec;23(12):3972–82. PMID: 21568638. [Open with Read]
Categories
Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Working Memory Clinical relevance EEG / MEG Neural Oscillations Papers Publications Speech

New paper out: Alpha oscil­la­tions in audition

I am also delight­ed to report the fruits of a very recent col­lab­o­ra­tion with Nathan Weisz and his OBOB lab at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Kon­stanz, Germany.

Alpha Rhythms in Audi­tion: Cog­ni­tive and Clin­i­cal Perspectives

In this review paper, which appears in the new, excit­ing “Fron­tiers in Psy­chol­o­gy” jour­nal, we sum the recent evi­dence that alpha oscil­la­tions (here broad­ly defined from 6 to 13 Hz) are play­ing a very inter­est­ing role in the audi­to­ry sys­tem, just as they do in the visu­al and the somatosen­so­ry system.

In essence, we back Ole Jensen’s and oth­ers’ quite pari­mo­nious idea of alpha as a func­tion­al inhi­bi­tion / gat­ing sys­tem across cor­ti­cal areas.

From our own lab, pre­lim­i­nary data from two recent exper­i­ments is includ­ed: On the role of alpha osil­la­tions as a poten­tial mark­er for speech intel­li­gi­bil­i­ty and its acoustic deter­mi­nants, as well as on speech degra­da­tion and work­ing mem­o­ry load and their com­bined reflec­tion in alpha pow­er increases.

 

NB — the final pdf is still lack­ing, and Front Psy­chol is still not list­ed in PubMed. This should not stop you from sub­mit­ting to their excit­ing new jour­nals, as the review process is very fair and effi­cient and the out­reach via free avail­abil­i­ty promis­es to be considerable.

Ref­er­ences

  • Weisz N, Hart­mann T, Müller N, Lorenz I, Obleser J. Alpha rhythms in audi­tion: cog­ni­tive and clin­i­cal per­spec­tives. Front Psy­chol. 2011 Apr 26;2:73. PMID: 21687444. [Open with Read]