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Category: Executive Functions

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Ageing Attention Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Auditory Speech Processing EEG / MEG Executive Functions fMRI Grants Hearing Loss Linguistics Neural dynamics Perception Semantics Uncategorized

A grant dou­ble to celebrate

We are hon­oured and delight­ed that the Deutsche Forschungs­ge­mein­schaft has deemed two of our recent appli­ca­tions wor­thy of fund­ing: The two senior researchers in the  lab, Sarah Tune and Malte Wöst­mann, have both been award­ed three-year grant fund­ing for their new projects. Congratulations!

In her 3‑year, 360‑K€ project “How per­cep­tu­al infer­ence changes with age: Behav­iour­al and brain dynam­ics of speech per­cep­tion”, Sarah Tune will explore the role of per­cep­tu­al pri­ors in speech per­cep­tion in the age­ing lis­ten­er. She will main­ly use neur­al and per­cep­tu­al mod­el­ling and func­tion­al neuroimaging.

In his 3‑year, 270‑K€ project “Inves­ti­ga­tion of cap­ture and sup­pres­sion in audi­to­ry atten­tion”, Malte Wöst­mann will con­tin­ue and refine his suc­cess­ful research endeav­our into dis­so­ci­at­ing the role of sup­pres­sive mech­a­nisms in the lis­ten­ing mind and brain, main­ly using EEG and behav­iour­al modelling.

Both of them will soon adver­tise posts for PhD can­di­dates to join us, accord­ing­ly, and to work on these excit­ing projects with Sarah and Malte and the rest of the Oble­ser­lab team

 

Categories
Attention Memory Papers

New Paper in Sci­en­tif­ic Reports by Lui&Wöstmann

A tick­ing clock in the liv­ing room; an ambi­ent music in the café; the foot­steps of a passers­by on the street – We are sur­round­ed by a pletho­ra of dis­tract­ing events with reg­u­lar tem­po­ral struc­tures in dai­ly life. Can we ignore these dis­trac­tors better?

Tro­by Ka-Yan Lui and Malte Wöst­mann recent­ly pub­lished a study on the effect of tem­po­ral­ly reg­u­lar ver­sus irreg­u­lar dis­trac­tors on the abil­i­ty to main­tain items in mem­o­ry. Sur­pris­ing­ly, they found that the tem­po­ral reg­u­lar­i­ty of dis­trac­tors did not have an effect on participant’s mem­o­ry per­for­mance. Instead, they found an effect of the tem­po­ral reg­u­lar­i­ty of dis­trac­tors on response behav­iour – par­tic­i­pants were faster and more biased in respond­ing whether the cur­rent num­ber matched with the num­ber in memory.

These results have the­o­ret­i­cal impli­ca­tions: exter­nal dis­trac­tion may have a more per­va­sive influ­ence on dif­fer­ent aspects of cog­ni­tive process­es than mem­o­ry main­te­nance. The arti­cle will soon be avail­able in Sci­en­tif­ic Reports.

Categories
Attention fMRI Memory Papers

New paper in Neu­roIm­age, Lim et al.

Atten­tion lets us focus our lim­it­ed cog­ni­tive resources on behav­ioral­ly impor­tant infor­ma­tion. Less obvi­ous is that atten­tion also helps us to hold infor­ma­tion in mem­o­ry with high pre­ci­sion. But how does the brain imple­ment this direct­ed atten­tion to mem­o­ry, and what behav­iour­al ben­e­fits does it yield for us humans?

For­mer post­doc Sung-Joo Lim (now at Bing­ham­ton Uni­ver­si­ty), Jonas Obleser, and a team of col­lab­o­ra­tors from Old­en­burg (Chris­tiane Thiel) and Leipzig (Bern­hard Sehm, Lorenz Deser­no, and Jöran Lep­sien) have now a new arti­cle on this old prob­lem, to appear in NeuroImage.

Using the changes in brain blood oxy­gena­tion as mea­sured with fMRI, this study demon­strates that atten­tion enables mem­o­ry main­te­nance of speech sound infor­ma­tion across mul­ti­ple brain regions. A speech-sen­si­tive brain region in the tem­po­ral lobe (the left supe­ri­or tem­po­ral sul­cus) con­tributes the most in pre­dict­ing the indi­vid­ual gain in recall pre­ci­sion of audi­to­ry objects from mem­o­ry. This study high­lights that func­tion­al­ly dis­crete brain regions work togeth­er in main­tain­ing and atten­tion­al­ly enhanc­ing work­ing mem­o­ry infor­ma­tion, but they exert dif­ferental influ­ences depend­ing on their func­tion­al specializations.

The full arti­cle is now avail­able here.

Categories
Adaptive Control Attention EEG / MEG Neural dynamics Papers Uncategorized

New paper in eLife, Waschke et al.

For­mer Oble­ser­lab PhD stu­dent Leo Waschke is now out in eLife with an inge­nious demon­stra­tion how both endoge­nous and exoge­nous­ly-dri­ven changes in the steep­ness of the brain-elec­tric 1/f pow­er spec­trum (in part linked direct­ly to local excitation:inhibiton, E:I, ratio) in neur­al pop­u­la­tions can affect behav­iour in com­plex, mul­ti-sen­so­ry envi­ron­ments: “Modal­i­ty-spe­cif­ic track­ing of atten­tion and sen­so­ry sta­tis­tics in the human elec­tro­phys­i­o­log­i­cal spec­tral expo­nent”. 

The results draw heav­i­ly on the recent spec­tral-slope expo­nent work by our col­lab­o­ra­tors at Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia San Diego in the lab of Bradley Voytek, and have come togeth­er in a three-lab col­labo of Lübeck, San Diego, and Leo’s cur­rent sci­en­tif­ic home, the Dou­glas Gar­rett lab at the MPIB.

 
Con­grat­u­la­tions, Leo!

Categories
Auditory Neuroscience Brain stimulation EEG / MEG Executive Functions fMRI Grants Job Offers Semantics Speech

We are hir­ing: new PhD train­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty start­ing spring 2022

Categories
Adaptive Control Editorial Notes Neural Oscillations Papers

New Paper accept­ed in Plos Biol­o­gy, Alavash et al.

 

Our lab is proud and hap­py that anoth­er major step­ping stone from our ERC con­sol­ida­tor project (“AUDADAPT”) is now accept­ed for pub­li­ca­tion in PLoS Biol­o­gy! Con­grat­u­la­tions to our first author Dr Mohsen Alavash, now a senior researcher in the Obleser lab in his own right.

 

 

Categories
Attention Auditory Neuroscience EEG / MEG Papers Publications Speech Tracking Unilateral Vocoding

New Paper in Trends in Hear­ing by Kraus et al.

Frauke Kraus, Sarah Tune, Anna Ruhe, Jonas Obleser & Malte Wöst­mann demon­strate that uni­lat­er­al acoustic degra­da­tion delays atten­tion­al sep­a­ra­tion of com­pet­ing speech.

Uni­lat­er­al cochlear implant (CI) users have to inte­grate acousti­cal­ly intact speech on one ear and acousti­cal­ly degrad­ed speech on the oth­er ear. How inter­act uni­lat­er­al acoustic degra­da­tion and spa­tial atten­tion in a mul­titalk­er situation?
N = 22 par­tic­i­pants took part in a com­pet­ing lis­ten­ing exper­i­ment while lis­ten­ing to an intact audio­book under dis­trac­tion of an acousti­cal­ly degrad­ed audio­book and vice ver­sa. Speech track­ing revealed not per se reduced atten­tion­al sep­a­ra­tion of acousti­cal­ly degrad­ed speech but instead a delay in time com­pared to intact speech. These find­ings might explain lis­ten­ing chal­lenges expe­ri­enced by uni­lat­er­al CI users.

To learn more, the paper is avail­able here.

Categories
Executive Functions Grants Gyrus Angularis Linguistics

New grant award­ed by the Deutsche Forschungs­ge­mein­schaft (DFG)