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Neu­ro­science 2012 Posters and Talks

Dear friends and col­leagues, SfN Participants!

Please go and check out our posters in New Orleans this year.
It’s all hap­pen­ing in the Mon­day (15 Octo­ber) AM posters ses­sion, plus a bit of Tues­day AM, and one talk on mon­day AM as well. Thanks for your support!

TALK MONDAY AM, 10:30
321.11 — Selec­tive atten­tion to audi­to­ry tem­po­ral fea­tures sep­a­rates domain-gen­er­al from tim­ing-spe­cif­ic func­tions
*M. J. HENRY, J. OBLESER;
(in the Nanosym­po­sium 321. “Tim­ing and Tem­po­ral Pro­cess­ing I”)

MONDAY AM POSTER SESSION
366.05/FF7 — Alpha-band activ­i­ty reflects trade-off between tem­po­ral pre­pared­ness and cog­ni­tive load for speech in noise
*A. WILSCH, M. J. HENRY, B. MAESS, J. OBLESER

368.10/II3 — Cor­ti­cal dynam­ics and sub­cor­ti­cal mor­phol­o­gy pre­dict rapid adap­ta­tion to chang­ing spec­tro-tem­po­ral cues
*M. SCHARINGER, M. J. HENRY, J. ERB, J. OBLESER

368.14/II7 — Per­cep­tu­al adap­ta­tion to degrad­ed speech: Tun­ing in cor­ti­cal and sub­cor­ti­cal brain struc­tures
*J. ERB, M. J. HENRY1, F. EISNER, J. OBLESER

368.21/II14 — Slow fre­quen­cy mod­u­la­tion entrains neur­al delta oscil­la­tions and deter­mines human lis­ten­ing behav­ior
M. J. HENRY, *J. OBLESER

TUESDAY AM POSTER SESSION
595.14/CCC5 — With­in-sub­ject alpha pow­er is neg­a­tive­ly cor­re­lat­ed with sub­jec­tive intel­li­gi­bil­i­ty — A study of degrad­ed word com­pre­hen­sion in MEG.
*C. MCGETTIGAN, S. KOTZ, B. MAESS, S. SCOTT, J. OBLESER

595.23/CCC14 — Func­tion­al lat­er­al­iza­tion of the infe­ri­or frontal gyrus dur­ing sen­tence pro­cess­ing: The influ­ence of struc­tur­al lat­er­al­iza­tion and hand­ed­ness
*L. MEYER, J. OBLESER, A. D. FRIEDERICI

Categories
Auditory Working Memory Degraded Acoustics EEG / MEG Events Executive Functions Neural Oscillations Posters Publications

Fur­ther posters at SFN / Neu­ro­science 2011

In addi­tion to the excit­ing con­so­nan­tal mis­match neg­a­tiv­i­ty work Math­ias and Alexan­dra will be show­ing (TUESDAY AM ses­sion, posters UU10 and UU11), we will have the fol­low­ing posters this year. Come by!

Chris Petkov and I are show­ing our brand new data in the TUESDAY PM ses­sion, poster LL14.

I myself will be pre­sent­ing in the WEDNESDAY AM ses­sion, XX15 – more alpha oscil­la­tions in work­ing mem­o­ry under speech degradation.

Final­ly, I also have the plea­sure to be a co-author on Sarah Jessen’s, who is show­ing très cool mul­ti­modal inte­gra­tion data on voic­es and bod­ies under noisy con­di­tions in the WEDNESDAY PM ses­sion, XX15.

Categories
Auditory Perception EEG / MEG Events Evoked Activity Posters Publications Speech

Poster Pre­sen­ta­tions at SFN

There will be two poster pre­sen­ta­tions at SFN in Wash­ing­ton, DC., on the top­ic of audi­to­ry pre­dic­tions in speech per­cep­tion. The first poster, authored by Alexan­dra Ben­dix­en, Math­ias Scharinger, and Jonas Obleser, sum­ma­rizes as follows:

Speech sig­nals are often com­pro­mised by dis­rup­tions orig­i­nat­ing from exter­nal (e.g., mask­ing noise) or inter­nal (e.g., slug­gish artic­u­la­tion) sources. Speech com­pre­hen­sion thus entails detect­ing and replac­ing miss­ing infor­ma­tion based on pre­dic­tive and restora­tive mech­a­nisms. The nature of the under­ly­ing neur­al mech­a­nisms is not yet well under­stood. In the present study, we inves­ti­gat­ed the detec­tion of miss­ing infor­ma­tion by occa­sion­al­ly omit­ting the final con­so­nants of the Ger­man words “Lachs” (salmon) or “Latz” (bib), result­ing in the syl­la­ble “La” (no seman­tic mean­ing). In three dif­fer­ent con­di­tions, stim­u­lus pre­sen­ta­tion was set up so that sub­jects expect­ed only the word “Lachs” (con­di­tion 1), only the word “Latz” (con­di­tion 2), or the words “Lachs” or “Latz” with equal prob­a­bil­i­ty (con­di­tion 3). Thus essen­tial­ly, the final seg­ment was pre­dictable in con­di­tions 1 and 2, but unpre­dictable in con­di­tion 3. Stim­uli were pre­sent­ed out­side the focus of atten­tion while sub­jects were watch­ing a silent video. Brain respons­es were mea­sured with mul­ti-chan­nel elec­troen­cephalo­gram (EEG) record­ings. In all con­di­tions, an omis­sion response was elicit­ed from 125 to 165 ms after the expect­ed onset of the final seg­ment. The omis­sion response shared char­ac­ter­is­tics of the omis­sion mis­match neg­a­tiv­i­ty (MMN) with gen­er­a­tors in audi­to­ry cor­ti­cal areas. Crit­i­cal­ly, the omis­sion response was enhanced in ampli­tude in the two pre­dictable con­di­tions (1, 2) com­pared to the unpre­dictable con­di­tion (3). Vio­lat­ing a strong pre­dic­tion thus elicit­ed a more pro­nounced omis­sion response. Con­sis­tent with a pre­dic­tive cod­ing account, the pro­cess­ing of miss­ing lin­guis­tic infor­ma­tion appears to be mod­u­lat­ed by pre­dic­tive context.

The sec­ond poster looks at sim­i­lar mate­r­i­al, but con­trasts coro­nal [t] with dor­sal [k], yield­ing inter­est­ing asym­me­tries in MMN responses:

Research in audi­to­ry neu­ro­science has lead to a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the neur­al bases of speech per­cep­tion, but the rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al nature of speech sounds with­in words is still a mat­ter of debate. Elec­tro­phys­i­o­log­i­cal research on sin­gle speech sounds pro­vid­ed evi­dence for abstract rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al units that com­prise infor­ma­tion about both acoustic struc­ture and artic­u­la­tor con­fig­u­ra­tion (Phillips et al., 2000), there­by refer­ring to phono­log­i­cal cat­e­gories. Here, we test the pro­cess­ing of word-final con­so­nants dif­fer­ing in their place of artic­u­la­tion (coro­nal [ts] vs. dor­sal [ks]) and acoustic struc­ture, as seen in the time-vary­ing for­mant (res­o­nance) fre­quen­cies. The respec­tive con­so­nants dis­tin­guish between the Ger­man nouns Latz (bib) and Lachs (salmon), record­ed from a female native speak­er. Ini­tial con­so­nant-vow­el sequences were aver­aged across the two nouns in order to avoid coar­tic­u­la­to­ry cues before the release of the con­so­nants. Latz and Lachs served as stan­dard and deviant in a pas­sive odd­ball par­a­digm, while the EEG from 20 par­tic­i­pants was record­ed. The change from stan­dard [ts] to deviant [ks] and vice ver­sa was accom­pa­nied by a dis­cernible Mis­match Neg­a­tiv­i­ty (MMN) response (Näätä­nen et al., 2007). This response showed an intrigu­ing asym­me­try, as seen in a main effect con­di­tion (deviant Latz vs. deviant Lachs, F(1,1920) = 291.84, p < 0.001) of an omnibus mixed-effect mod­el. Cru­cial­ly, the MMN for the deviant Latz was on aver­age more neg­a­tive than the MMN for the deviant Lachs from 135 to 185 ms post deviance onset (p < 0.001). We inter­pret these find­ings as reflect­ing a dif­fer­ence in phono­log­i­cal speci­fici­ty: Fol­low­ing Eulitz and Lahiri, 2004, we assume coro­nal seg­ments ([ts]) to have less spe­cif­ic (‘fea­t­u­ral­ly under­spec­i­fied’) rep­re­sen­ta­tions than dor­sal seg­ments ([ks]). While in stan­dard posi­tion, Lachs acti­vat­ed a mem­o­ry trace with a more spe­cif­ic final con­so­nant for which the deviant pro­vid­ed a stronger mis­match than vice ver­sa, i.e. when Latz acti­vat­ed a mem­o­ry trace with a less spe­cif­ic final con­so­nant. Our results sup­port a mod­el of speech per­cep­tion where sen­so­ry infor­ma­tion is processed in terms of dis­crete units inde­pen­dent of high­er lex­i­cal prop­er­ties, as the asym­me­try can­not be explained by dif­fer­ences in lex­i­cal sur­face fre­quen­cies between Latz and Lachs (both log-fre­quen­cies of 0.69). We can also rule out a fre­quen­cy effect on the seg­men­tal lev­el. Thus, it appears that speech per­cep­tion involves a lev­el of pro­cess­ing where indi­vid­ual seg­men­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tions with­in words are evaluated.

Categories
Editorial Notes Events

Autumn trav­els

Before our lit­tle lab gets into full throt­tle in late 2010/early 2011 with a great selec­tion of new stu­dents and post­docs join­ing, I will be tour­ing a bit with my most recent data. 

For late Octo­ber, my for­mer co-super­vi­sor Adi­ti Lahiri has kind­ly invit­ed me to give a talk in Oxford.

In Novem­ber, I will be attend­ing the Neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy of Lan­guage Con­fer­ence in San Diego and present our α‑band in spec­tral­ly vs. tem­po­ral­ly degrad­ed word com­pre­hen­sion data.

Direct­ly fol­low­ing is the Soci­ety for Neu­ro­science con­fer­ence, in San Diego as well. Come and find us in a Nano-sym­po­sium Jonathan Peelle has kind­ly put together.

It will take place on Wednes­day after­noon (last day), Novem­ber 17, and will fea­ture a great selec­tion of speak­ers from our field.

Categories
Auditory Neuroscience Degraded Acoustics Editorial Notes Events fMRI Linguistics Posters Publications

Vis­it us at CNS

UPDATE — The Vol­cano ash that Island is kind­ly sup­ply­ing might pre­vent us from get­ting to Mon­tréal. Let’s see whether we make it until the poster ses­sion starts on Sun­day. But I am slight­ly pes­simistic on that.

 

I am cur­rent­ly quite busy with fin­ish­ing off loads of old data and prepar­ing new adven­tures in audi­to­ry neu­ro­science. Stay tuned for more!

Mean­while, if you have a few-hours stop-over in Mon­tréal, Cana­da next week: Why don’t you come and find us at the Annu­al Meet­ing of the Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science Soci­ety.

I will present a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort with old Kon­stanz acquain­tance Dr. Nathan Weisz on brain oscil­la­to­ry mea­sures in degrad­ed speech—a field I feel very strong­ly about cur­rent­ly and which will sure­ly keep me busy for years to come:

Poster D 53 — Spec­tral fea­tures of speech dri­ve the induced EEG brain response: Para­met­ric changes in Alpha- and Theta-band power

Also, our stu­dent Lars Mey­er will present a neat fMRI study we recent­ly ran on real­ly nasty (yet per­fect­ly legal) Ger­man syn­tax and how the brain deals with it under as-nasty (poor, that is) acoustics:

Poster I31When Com­plex Gram­mar Must Pass the Bot­tle­neck of Degrad­ed Acoustics: an fMRI Study.

See you in Montréal!

Categories
Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Speech Processing Degraded Acoustics Events fMRI Noise-Vocoded Speech Papers Publications

Talk at the Soci­ety for Neu­ro­science Meet­ing, Wash­ing­ton, DC on Wednesday

If you hap­pen to be at SfN this week, you might want to check out my short pre­sen­ta­tion on a recent study [1] we did: What do spec­tral (fre­quen­cy-domain) and tem­po­ral (time-domain) fea­tures real­ly con­tribute to speech com­pre­hen­sion process­es in the tem­po­ral lobes?

It is in the Audi­to­ry Cor­tex Ses­sion (710), tak­ing place in Room 145B. My talk is sched­uled for 0945 am.

[1] Obleser, J., Eis­ner, F., Kotz, S.A. (2008) Bilat­er­al speech com­pre­hen­sion reflects dif­fer­en­tial sen­si­tiv­i­ty to spec­tral and tem­po­ral fea­tures. Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science, 28(32):8116–8124.

Ref­er­ences

  • Obleser J, Eis­ner F, Kotz SA. Bilat­er­al speech com­pre­hen­sion reflects dif­fer­en­tial sen­si­tiv­i­ty to spec­tral and tem­po­ral fea­tures. J Neu­rosci. 2008 Aug 6;28(32):8116–23. PMID: 18685036. [Open with Read]