Category: Editorial Notes

ERC Consolidator Grant awarded to Jonas Obleser

Post author By Jonas
Post date 2015/03/19

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.

Tags Obleser

Editorial Notes

2015 — Embracing Change in the Obleser Lab

Post author By Jonas
Post date 2015/02/09

Time flies: The Auditory Cognition group aka The Obleser Lab has just entered its fifth year. We took off properly in early 2011, so this is a good point in time to briefly recap. We have had four exciting and very productive years so far, and this fifth year is bringing a lot of exciting turn-over as well. First, new faces have joined our group:

Dr. Sophie Herbst a psychologist with keen interests in time perception joined us as a postdoc, coming from Niko Busch’s lab at the Charité Berlin.

Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Lorenz Fiedler joined us to help us build real-time links between EEG and hearing aids, as planned in our Volkswagen project.

Second, a few great talents have moved on with the beginning of 2015:

Antje Strauß just received her Dr. rer. nat. (PhD) from the University of Leipzig and is now at the GIPSA lab, University of Grenoble, France.

Dr. Molly Henry and Dr. Björn Herrmann have both taken up new Postdoctoral jobs at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, CA. They will be working with Jessica Grahn and Ingrid Johnsrude, respectively.

Dr. Alex Brandmeyer could not resist a fantastic offer by Dolby Systems Inc., San Francisco to join them as a research scientist.

Earlier in autumn 2014 already, Julia Erb had taken up a postdoc position with Elia Formisano at the University of Maastricht.

… the best of luck and many thanks to all the new AC alumni!

Lastly, Jonas as head of the group has just been appointed Professor for Research Methods and Statistics at the (newly-founded) Department of Psychology, University of Lübeck, Germany.

These great news also imply that the Auditory Cognition group as a whole will, as conceived by the Max Planck Society when providing this five-year start-up funding, slowly transplant to a new place, namely: Lübeck, over the year to come. Watch this space! Yet, the labels “auditorycognition.com” and “obleserlab.com” will surely remain active and move with us.

Tags Brandmeyer, Busch, Charité, Dolby, Erb, Fiedler, Formisano, GIPSA, Grahn, Henry, Herbst, Herrmann, Johnsrude, Lübeck, Obleser, Strauß, Volkswagen

Editorial Notes EEG / MEG Grants Hearing Loss

New grant by the Oticon Foundation

Post author By Jonas
Post date 2015/01/05

Our lab has been awarded a 100,000 € (750,000 DKK) research grant by the Danish Oticon foundation.

Together with Thomas Lunner from the Eriksholm Research Centre, we will explore real-time neural (EEG) measures and forms of neural hearing-aid control.

This work is conceived to support and further develop our efforts funded earlier in 2014 by the Volkswagen Foundation (from the “Experiment!” call for high-risk projects, 100,000 €).

Editorial Notes

Greetings from the East Coast Mini-sabbatical

Post author By Jonas
Post date 2014/11/26

In these last months of 2014, I am spending a few weeks in New York and the East Coast. Thanks to my generous host Peter Lakatos at the NKI and pampered by the marvellous Erasmus Mundus program initiated by Rudolf Ruebsamen and Marc Schoenwiesner, I am fortunate to explore with Peter a comparative view on the role of alpha oscillations in auditory cortex and in thalamo-cortical circuits.
This stay essentially sandwiches a productive visit to the Society for Neuroscience 2014 meeting in DC a few weeks ago, where our group presented four posters this year.
Also, it has been a great honour to be awarded the Young Investigators Spotlight talk at this year’s APAN meeting (an annual auditory-neuroscience SfN satellite). Invitations to the labs of David Poeppel (for the impressive annual BryCoCo bash); Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, Oded Ghitza, and Steve Colbourn (at the Boston Hearing Research Center) and to the lab of Sabine Kastner (Princeton Neuroscience Institute) have rendered this stay highly memorable before it is even over.

Tags Lakatos, Obleser

Editorial Notes

Hooray for Dr. des. Julia Erb …

Post author By Jonas
Post date 2014/06/12

… the first PhD student from the Auditory Cognition group, started in January 2011, to defend her PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) thesis.

Julia presented her work last thursday to the defense committee, and will now move on to a great Postdoc position – it seems she will have a hard choice between two great options.

Thank you Julia for the great science and the great fun you brought to the lab! And thanks to the external examiner as well as to Erich Schröger and all committee members at the University of Leipzig, who kindly collaborate on graduating our students.

We wish you all the best

-Members of AC

Tags Erb, Obleser

Auditory Perception Auditory Working Memory Events fMRI Neural Oscillations Neural Phase Posters

Come and find us at CNS 2014 in Boston this weekend

Post author By Jonas
Post date 2014/04/04

The Obleser lab will be presenting four posters at this year’s Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in Boston.

If you happen to be there, come check us out!

A125 — Hemodynamic signatures of (mis-)perceiving temporal change
Herrmann, Bjoern

C63 — Temporal predictability attenuates decay in sensory memory
Wilsch, Anna

D54 — Stimulus discriminability and predictiveness modulate alpha oscillations in a perceptually demanding memory task
Wöstmann, Malte

D130 — Slow acoustic fluctuations entrain low-frequency neural oscillations and determine psychoacoustic performance
Henry, Molly

Tags CNS, Henry, Herrmann, Wilsch, Wöstmann

Editorial Notes

Welcome Sung-Joo Lim & Alex Brandmeyer

Post author By Jonas
Post date 2014/02/10

We welcome Sung-Joo Lim (KR) & Alex Brandmeyer (US) as new postdoctoral researchers in the group.

Sung-Joo very recently received her Ph.D. from the Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA (US), after

Investigating the Neural Basis of Sound Category Learning within a Naturalistic Incidental Task

See her abstract

Adults have notorious difficulty learning non-native speech categories even with extensive training with standard tasks providing explicit trial-by-trial feedback. Recent research in general auditory category learning demonstrates that videogame-based training, which incorporates features that model the naturalistic learning environment, leads to fast and robust learning of sound categories. Unlike standard tasks, the videogame paradigm does not require overt categorization of or explicit attention to sounds; listeners learn sounds incidentally as the game encourages the functional use of sounds in an environment, in which actions and feedback are tightly linked to task success. These characteristics may engage reinforcement learning systems, which can potentially generate internal feedback signals from the striatum. However, the influence of striatal signals on perceptual learning and plasticity online during training has yet to be established. This dissertation work focuses on the possibility that this type of training can lead to behavioral learning of non-native speech categories, and on the investigation of neural processes postulated to be significant for inducing incidental learning of sound categories within the more naturalistic training environment by using fMRI. Overall, our results suggest that reward-related signals from the striatum influence perceptual representations in regions associated with the processing of reliable information that can improve performance within a naturalistic learning task.

Alex very recently received his Ph.D. from the Radboud University of Nijmegen (NL), addressing his thesis topic with

Auditory brain-computer interfaces for perceptual learning in speech and music

See his abstract

We perceive the sounds in our environment, such as language and music, effortlessly and transparently, unaware of the complex neurophysiological mechanisms that underlie our experiences. Using electroencephalography (EEG) and techniques from the field of machine learning, it’s possible to monitor our perception of the auditory world in real-time and to pinpoint individual differences in perceptual abilities related to native-language background and auditory experience. Going further, these same methods can be used to provide individuals with neurofeedback during auditory perception as a means of modulating brain responses to sounds, with the eventual aim of incorporating these methods into educational settings to aid in auditory perceptual learning.

Wishing you all the best.

Tags Brandmeyer, Lim

Editorial Notes Events Media Publications

SNAP summary and impressions

Post author By Jonas
Post date 2013/12/15

The SNAP workshop (Signal and Noise along the Auditory Pathway) is behind us.

It is safe to say that it has been a great success. We will carefully look into the evaluation forms you provided, and we will inform here in due course whether and when a 2^nd SNAP (potentially 2015) is in the making.

Let us thank all of you who made SNAP happen. It turned a fun and successful scientific year 2013 into an even greater one. Thank you! We hope to see you soon again, somewhere.

Now, here are some impressions of SNAP 2013: