Auditory CognitionCome and see our very first auditory cognition newsletter. From now on we want to present impressions of our latest work and results twice a year. In the interview section you also have the chance to learn more about our members.
Please note: As the newsletter also reaches our participants it is written in german.
Save your slot at the SNAP2017 workshop in Lübeck (December 8–9). Registration is available at snap.obleserlab.com and will end soon! A first line-up is already live. Submission deadline for the Posters will be July 31st, acceptance notifications will be sent out in August 2017.
The workshop will bring together, for two days of science, about 12 international speakers on neuroscience, psychophysics and engineering perspectives on processing degraded sound and speech.
Story time: Some time in early 2011, I sat down with an American, fresh PhD graduate who had just joined my new lab, in a Leipzig bar (Café Cantona; if you are interested you can find this great 24⁄7 bar with exquisite food also in the acknowledgments of, e.g., Obleser & Eisner, Trends Cogn Sci, 2009).
To the day, I could still point you to the table she and I sat down at, and the wall I faced (which is notable because we actually spent an unhealthy amount of time and money there over the years). Soon thereafter, we grabbed a beer mat and started scribbling waves and marked where we would place so-called targets (psychologist lingo) and talked a lot of gibberish about frequency modulation. I remember vididly that I had just read an insanely long review paper on neural oscillations by Wolfgang Klimesch (that, more in passing, cited old-school tales of Schmitt filters by the late great Francesco Varela or pioneers sounding like record producers, Dustman & Beck, 1965), while the young American opposite me turned out to be an—if adventurous—die-hard expert on auditory psychophysics.
Who would have thought that this very night would carry me towards tenure in three years’ time, and her around the globe as an esteemed young colleague.
When I nowadays check Google scholar, I am amazed to see that already more than 100 other papers have cited what directly grew out of that beer mat one and a half years later—not counting the many more papers this said postdoc, Molly Henry, has produced since.
Here is the link to how excited we were when the paper appeared in PNAS in 2012, and a link to the little movie a german science program kindly produced on all of this in 2013.
Wow: Massive congratulations to Lea Schmitt, who just has been awarded the Colin Cherry Award 2017 at the 9th Speech in Noise (SPIN) workshop in Oldenburg. Germany. The Colin Cherry award honours the best poster (audience award) and gets you a cocktail shaker set.
Lea’s work, which formed her MSc thesis, is both provocative and imaginative: Lea went after the ancient truism that closing your eyes helps you in difficult listening situations. Turns out it’s not that simple, but Lea established a very neat link to individual differences in alpha-power dynamics. Watch this space for a new paper to come (Schmitt, Obleser, & Wöstmann, forthcoming).
Lea is not only the first student to receive her MSc in the new Obleser lab in Lübeck, but (maybe not so) incidentally, she was mainly supervised by a former Colin Cherry Award winner himself, Obleserlab’s own Malte Wöstmann. Congratulations to both!
Disability, techno-bodies, and the question of autonomy. On Friday the 21th October, Lorenz is joining the 19th “Schwarzmarkt des Wissens” in Hamburg.
“The Blackmarket attempts to bring together areas, which generally do not belong together in public perception: the reality of physical and mental disability with critical visions on the future of the body and society. Wheelchair users, biohackers, cyborgs, post‑, trans- and para-humans and humanists, sign language users, physicians, prosthetists, ethicists, robotic experts and the neuro-divergent, artists, technological prophets and critics come together to invent an ethics for contemporary bodies.”
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.
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:
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.