On this years SPIN (Speech in Noise) workshop in Marseille, our very own Malte Wöstmann received the Colin Cherry Best Poster Award, elected by workshop attendees.
Judge for yourself and check out the Poster (PDF) here.
On this years SPIN (Speech in Noise) workshop in Marseille, our very own Malte Wöstmann received the Colin Cherry Best Poster Award, elected by workshop attendees.
Judge for yourself and check out the Poster (PDF) here.
Watch this space and the PLOS ONE website for a forthcoming article by Molly Henry and me;
Dissociable neural response signatures for slow amplitude and frequency modulation in human auditory cortex
Harking back at what we had argued initially in our 2012 Frontiers op’ed piece (together with Björn Herrmann), Molly presents neat evidence for dissociable cortical signatures of slow amplitude versus frequency modulation. These cortical signatures potentially provide an efficient means to dissect simultaneously communicated slow temporal and spectral information in acoustic communication signals.
[Update]German public television broadcaster 3sat featured our research on neural oscillations (see our PNAS Paper) in its series nano .
Unfortunately it’s only in German. However, have fun watching it:
Oscillatory Phase Dynamics in Neural Entrainment Underpin Illusory Percepts of Time
Natural sounds like speech and music inherently vary in tempo over time. Yet, contextual factors such as variations in the sound’s loudness or pitch influence perception of temporal rate change towards slowing down or speeding up.
A new MEG study by Björn Herrmann, Molly Henry, Maren Grigutsch and Jonas Obleser asked for the neural oscillatory dynamics that underpin context-induced illusions in temporal rate change and found illusory percepts to be linked to changes in the neural phase patterns of entrained oscillations while the exact frequency of the oscillatory response was related to veridical percepts.
The paper is in press and forthcoming in The Journal of Neuroscience.
Update:
Paper is available online.
German science magazine Spektrum published an article on our recent paper (see our post):
Frequency modulation entrains slow neural oscillations and optimizes human listening behavior
issued in PNAS here.
Illustrated with our nice group photo you can read the article: Mit Rhythmus geht auch Hören besser by Annegret Faber online.
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!
German radio broadcaster Deutschlandradio produced three recent reports on neural oscillations and our recent PNAS paper. You can listen to/read (in German language) them here:
Next time we’ll post before the broadcasting takes place…
Our new paper on neural entrainment with spectral fluctuations, and its effects on near-threshold auditory perception is now online in the “early edition” of PNAS:
Henry, MJ & Obleser, J (in press):
Frequency modulation entrains slow neural oscillations and optimizes human listening behavior
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS)
The human ability to continuously track dynamic environmental stimuli, in particular speech, is proposed to profit from “entrainment” of endogenous neural oscillations, which involves phase reorganization such that “optimal” phase comes into line with temporally expected critical events, resulting in improved processing. The current experiment goes beyond previous work in this domain by addressing two thus far unanswered questions. First, how general is neural entrainment to environmental rhythms: Can neural oscillations be entrained by temporal dynamics of ongoing rhythmic stimuli without abrupt onsets? Second, does neural entrainment optimize performance of the perceptual system: Does human auditory perception benefit from neural phase reorganization? In a human electroencephalography study, listeners detected short gaps distributed uniformly with respect to the phase angle of a 3‑Hz frequency-modulated stimulus. Listeners’ ability to detect gaps in the frequency-modulated sound was not uniformly distributed in time, but clustered in certain preferred phases of the modulation. Moreover, the optimal stimulus phase was individually determined by the neural delta oscillation entrained by the stimulus. Finally, delta phase predicted behavior better than stimulus phase or the event-related potential after the gap. This study demonstrates behavioral benefits of phase realignment in response to frequency-modulated auditory stimuli, overall suggesting that frequency fluctuations in natural environmental input provide a pacing signal for endogenous neural oscillations, thereby influencing perceptual processing.
NB: There is also a press release by the Max Planck Society on the topic.