Jonas collaborated with former Max Planck colleagues and the Marinos Imaging Center at Harvard (first author Fahimeh Mamashli) on a re-analysis of a simple speech/language paradigm.
In this new paper out now in J Neurosci, Fahimeh shows that activity in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) doesn’t just respond to meaning—it predicts it. Using machine learning, we demonstrate that IFG activity can forecast future activity in the superior and middle temporal gyri during the N400 window, a key neural marker of semantic processing. This provides rare, arguably causal, evidence for feedback from frontal to temporal areas, supporting dynamic, bidirectional models of language comprehension.
Category: Evoked Activity
My colleagues and collaborator Peter Lakatos and Molly Henry and I took to our desks and Matlab consoles, when Assaf Breska and Leon Deouell came out earlier this year with their paper in Plos Biology.
We had a few things to say about what we then perceived as a rather pessimistic assessment of neural entrainment. However, since then a great and quite frutiful discussion has emerged, now published in Plos Biology:
Meanwhile, Breska and Deouell added some more behavioural data and replied to us (now also published).
— Enjoy!
Here comes a new paper in Nature Communications by former AC postdoc Molly Henry, with former fellow postdoc AC alumnus Björn Herrmann, our tireless lab manager, Dunja Kunke, and myself! It is a late (to us quite important) result from our lab’s tenure at the Max Planck in Leipzig,
Henry, M.J., Herrmann, B., Kunke, D., Obleser, J. (In press). Aging affects the balance of neural entrainment and top-down neural modulation in the listening brain. Nature Communications.
—Congratulations, Molly!
Auditory Cognition’s own Malte Wöstmann is in press in Cerebral Cortex with his latest offering on how attentional control manifests in alpha power changes: Ignoring speech can be beneficial (if comprehending speech potentially detracts from another task), and we here show how this change in listening goals turns around the pattern of alpha-power changes with changing speech degradation. (We will update as the paper becomes available online.)
Wöstmann, M., Lim, S.J., & Obleser, J. (2017). The human neural alpha response to speech is a proxy of attentional control. Cerebral Cortex. In press.
Very proud: PhD student Lorenz Fiedler goes live (pre-peer-review) with his work of predicting the focus of attention in single-channel/forward models in in-ear EEG!
Here is the preprint of the paper, which now will undergo peer-review. Thanks for checking it out!
Congratulation to PhD student Malte Wöstmann, who – with Erich Schröger and Jonas Obleser – has a new article in press at the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Acoustic detail guides attention allocation in a selective listening task
forthcoming. We will update you accordingly as the paper comes online. We will share however one of Malte’s figures here as a teaser: The paper utilises a very classic component of the evoked potential, the contingent negative variation (the CNV; or a close relative thereof, see the actual paper for discussion) to study how older and younger listeners allocate their attentional resources depending on implicit cues on to-be-expected listening difficulties.
References
- Wöstmann M1, Schröger E, Obleser J. Acoustic Detail Guides Attention Allocation in a Selective Listening Task. J Cogn Neurosci. 2014 Nov 12:1–13. PMID: 25390200. [Open with Read]
Björn Herrmann has yet another paper in press in the Journal of Neuroscience!
Dynamic Range Adaptation to Spectral Stimulus Statistics in Human Auditory Cortex
The paper is now available online free of charge, and—funnily enough—appeared right on January 1, 2014.
References
- Herrmann B, Schlichting N, Obleser J. Dynamic range adaptation to spectral stimulus statistics in human auditory cortex. J Neurosci. 2014 Jan 1;34(1):327–31. PMID: 24381293. [Open with Read]
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]