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EEG / MEG Neural Oscillations Perception Posters Publications

Col­in Cher­ry Award 2014 goes to Malte Wöstmann

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

Colin Cherry Award 2014 goes to Malte Wöstmann
Col­in Cher­ry Award 2014 goes to Malte Wöstmann
Categories
Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Auditory Speech Processing EEG / MEG Neural Oscillations Neural Phase Papers Publications

New paper in press: Hen­ry & Obleser, PLOS ONE [Update]

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]

Paper is avail­able here.

Ref­er­ences

  • Hen­ry MJ, Obleser J. Dis­so­cia­ble neur­al response sig­na­tures for slow ampli­tude and fre­quen­cy mod­u­la­tion in human audi­to­ry cor­tex. PLoS One. 2013 Oct 29;8(10):e78758. PMID: 24205309. [Open with Read]
Categories
Auditory Perception EEG / MEG Media Neural Oscillations Neural Phase Perception Publications

3sat fea­tures neur­al oscil­la­tions on TV

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:

[Update] If the embed­ded video is not work­ing for you, watch it on the 3sat web­site (Flash).

Ref­er­ences

  • Hen­ry MJ, Obleser J. Fre­quen­cy mod­u­la­tion entrains slow neur­al oscil­la­tions and opti­mizes human lis­ten­ing behav­ior. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Dec 4;109(49):20095–100. PMID: 23151506. [Open with Read]
Categories
Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception EEG / MEG Neural Oscillations Neural Phase Papers Perception Publications

New paper in press: Her­rmann, Hen­ry, Grigutsch & Obleser, The Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science [Update]

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.

Ref­er­ences

  • Her­rmann B, Hen­ry MJ, Grigutsch M, Obleser J. Oscil­la­to­ry phase dynam­ics in neur­al entrain­ment under­pin illu­so­ry per­cepts of time. J Neu­rosci. 2013 Oct 2;33(40):15799–809. PMID: 24089487. [Open with Read]
Categories
Neural Oscillations

Spek­trum on neur­al oscil­la­tions (Hen­ry & Obleser)

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.

Ref­er­ences

  • Hen­ry MJ, Obleser J. Fre­quen­cy mod­u­la­tion entrains slow neur­al oscil­la­tions and opti­mizes human lis­ten­ing behav­ior. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Dec 4;109(49):20095–100. PMID: 23151506. [Open with Read]
Categories
Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Editorial Notes EEG / MEG Neural Oscillations Neural Phase Papers Perception Publications

New paper out: Hen­ry & Her­rmann, Jour­nal of Neuroscience

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.

A Pre­clud­ing Role of Low-Fre­quen­cy Oscil­la­tions for Audi­to­ry Per­cep­tion in a Con­tin­u­ous Pro­cess­ing Mode

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]
Categories
Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Speech Processing EEG / MEG Media Neural Oscillations Publications Speech

DRa­dio broad­cast­ed three fea­tures on neur­al oscil­la­tions (Hen­ry & Obleser)

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…

Ref­er­ences

  • Hen­ry MJ, Obleser J. Fre­quen­cy mod­u­la­tion entrains slow neur­al oscil­la­tions and opti­mizes human lis­ten­ing behav­ior. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Dec 4;109(49):20095–100. PMID: 23151506. [Open with Read]
Categories
Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Speech Processing EEG / MEG Neural Oscillations Neural Phase Papers Publications Speech

New Paper in PNAS: Hen­ry & Obleser [Updat­ed]

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)


Here is the abstract:

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.

Ref­er­ences

  • Hen­ry MJ, Obleser J. Fre­quen­cy mod­u­la­tion entrains slow neur­al oscil­la­tions and opti­mizes human lis­ten­ing behav­ior. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Dec 4;109(49):20095–100. PMID: 23151506. [Open with Read]