Martin Orf is one of three recipients of this year’s EUHA Award for Outstanding Thesis from the European Union of Hearing Acousticians. His thesis, titled “Selective Attention in Multi-Talker Situations: Neural and Behavioral Mechanisms”, offers valuable insights into the neural and behavioural processes behind selective attention in complex listening environments. A key finding of his research is that the neural representation of attended speech becomes stronger when a competing, ignored speech stream is being compressed in its dynamics (a very common yet ill-understood signal processing technique in audio production and also in hearing devices). Martin’s discovery could contribute to the development of future hearing aid algorithms and in the refinement of existing ones.
Category: Neural Filters
Out now in eLife: Obleserlab stats modelling wiz Sarah Tune together with Jonas has just published a serious statistical piece of evidence on how, in our >N=100 cohort of ageing listeners as funded by the European Research Council, neural signatures of attentive listening and the actual behavioural outcome a listener achieves are not trivially connected, and in fact are not even predictive of one another – when we look at the longitudinal, two-year trajectory that listeners exhibit in both measures over time.
This study (here is a brief eLife digest on it) poses a keystone result to the ERC project “AUDADAPT”, which we now continue with other projects and spin-offs. Many thanks to the large group of Lübeck citizens who continue to support us with their precious time and their brain and behavioural data!
Diese Studie (hier ist eine kurze eLife-Zusammenfassung) ist ein Schlüsselergebnis des ERC-Projekts “AUDADAPT”, das wir nun mit anderen Projekten und Spin-offs fortsetzen. Vielen Dank an die große Gruppe von Lübecker Bürgerinnen und Bürgern, die uns weiterhin mit ihrer kostbaren Zeit und ihren Gehirn- und Verhaltensdaten unterstützen!
Our lab (senior author Sarah Tune) teamed up once again with the Babylab Lübeck, led by Sarah Jessen: Sarah and Sarah co-wrote a great tutorial on how the versatile analysis framework of temporal response functions can be used to analyse brain data obtained in infants. The article has now been accepted for publication in the well-reputed journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience:
Very excited to share our new tutorial article together with @jonasobleser and @sarahs_tunes on how neural tracking can be used to analyze infant EEG data. https://t.co/UnHljCEwkm
— Sarah Jessen @sarahjessen.bsky.social (@jessen_sarah) November 9, 2021
We are very excited to share that Obleserlab postdoc Sarah Tune has a new paper in Nature Communications. „Neural attentional-filter mechanisms of listening success in middle-aged and older participants“ is our latest and to-date most extensive output of the longitudinal ERC Consolidator project on adaptive listening in ageing individual (AUDADAPT).
This co-production with current (Mohsen Alavash and Jonas Obleser) and former (Lorenz Fiedler) Obleserlab members, takes an in-depth and integrative look at how two of the most extensively studied neurobiological attentional-filter implementations, alpha power lateralization and selective neural speech tracking, relate to one another and to listening sucess.
Leveraging our large, representative sample of aging listeners (N=155, 39–80 years), we show that both neural filter implementatins are robustly modulated by attention but operate surprinsingly independent of one another.
In a series of sophisticated single-trial linear models that include variation in neural filter strength within and between individuals, we demonstrate how the preferential neural tracking of attended versus ignored speech but not alpha lateralization boosts listening success.
To learn more, the paper is available here.
