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.
Category: Editorial Notes
Hooray for Dr. des. Julia Erb …
… 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
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
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
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
Wishing you all the best.
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 2nd 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:
P.S. Here you find Jonas’ closing summary notes:
SNAP Day 1 is behind us
A great day 1 of the SNAP workshop is behind us. It could go on forever, if it would be according to me.
While Thomas Lunner was sadly stopped short by new program committee member, pan-European storm rascal “Xaver”, 45 others made it succesfully to the Max Planck in Leipzig, witnessing Ingrid Johnsrude, Torsten Dau, Alexandra Bendixen, Maria Chait, Jonathan Peelle, and Peter Lakatos bringing the house down.
With the speakers’ support, I will potentially post a summary pdf of my closing remarks, which I will give tomorrow, for public access.
As for now, feel free to follow Carolyn McGettigan and Jonathan Peelle covering some of it as SNAP continues into day 2 (#SNAPleipzig).
The Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig and the Max Planck Research Group “Auditory Cognition” (headed by Jonas Obleser) are now offering a Postdoctoral researcher position, for initially 2 years, preferably starting by October 2013.
Successful candidates will have a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, psychology, or natural sciences. Prior experience with either fMRI or EEG/MEG methods is expected, and an interest in further applying and combining both domains in their research is highly desirable. Candidates with a background and/or interest in advanced fMRI methods are particularly encouraged to apply.
Proud to announce that our postdocs Molly Henry and Björn Herrmann just came out with a review/op piece in the Journal of Neuroscience “journal club” section, where only grad students or postdocs are allowed to author short review pieces.
The Journal of Neuroscience, 5 December 2012, 32(49): 17525–17527; doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4456–12.2012
Molly and Björn review (and comment on) an important paper by our friends and colleagues Christoph Kayser and Benedikt Ng in the same journal. Essentially, they argue for the distinction of a continuous from an oscillatory processing mode in listening, and provide tentative explanations of why sometimes misses might be more modulated by neural oscillatory phase than hits. Congrats, guys!
References
- Henry MJ, Herrmann B. A precluding role of low-frequency oscillations for auditory perception in a continuous processing mode. J Neurosci. 2012 Dec 5;32(49):17525–7. PMID: 23223276. [Open with Read]