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: Adaptive Control
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!
https://twitter.com/bradleyvoytek/status/1451591258384650244?s=20
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.
Whoop. “ Dear Dr Alavash,
I am pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been formally accepted for publication in PLOS Biology.” — w/ @sarahs_tunes @ObleserLab @PLOSBiology https://t.co/cw8AQpo9UE— Jonas Obleser (@jonasobleser) September 16, 2021
Congratulations to our currently ERC-funded lab member and postdoc Mohsen Alavash who has just secured 3‑year funding (~380,000 €) by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for an ambitious project: Mohsen wants to get closer to a network/graph-theoretical description of how spatial attention in the listening brain is organised. In a later stage of the project, Mohsen also plans on studying how the network organisation of spatial attention may be altered in hearing-impaired listeners.
We are glad that Mohsen plans on running this project within the Obleser lab, here at the University of Lübeck.
Also, make sure to check out Mohsen’s latest publication on the topic.
Im Februar hatte ich die Ehre, für die Kind Hörstiftung auf deren 2019er Symposium in Berlin unsere Arbeiten zur Vorhersage des Hörerfolgs exemplarisch anhand einiger unserer Studien allgemeinverständlich zu beleuchten. Ein 25-minütiges Video dieses Vortrags ist jetzt online.
(In February, I had the honour of presenting some of our recent work on predicting individuals’ listening success at the symposium of the Kind Hearing Foundation. A video in German is now available.)
How brain areas communicate shapes human communication: The hearing regions in your brain form new alliances as you try to listen at the cocktail party
Obleserlab Postdocs Mohsen Alavash and Sarah Tune rock out an intricate graph-theoretical account of modular reconfigurations in challenging listening situations, and how these predict individuals’ listening success.
Available online now in PNAS! (Also, our uni is currently featuring a German-language press release on it, as well as an English-language version)
Congratulations to Obleserlab alumna Anna Wilsch, who is – for now – leaving academia on a true high with her latest offering on how temporal expectations (“foreknowledge” about when something is to happen) shape the neural make-up of memory!
Recorded while the Obleserlab was still in Leipzig at the Max Planck, and analysed with great input from our co-authors Molly Henry, Björn Herrmann as well as Christoph Herrmann (Oldenburg), Anna used Magnetoencephalography in an intricate but ultimately very simple sensory-memory paradigm.
While sensory memories of the physical world fade quickly, Anna here shows that this decay of short-term memory can be counteracted by temporal expectation.
Notably, spatially distributed cortical patterns of alpha (8−−13 Hz) power showed opposing effects in auditory vs. visual sensory cortices. Moreover, alpha-tuned connectivity changes within supramodal attention networks reflect the allocation of neural resources as short-term memory representations fade.
— to be updated as the paper will become available online –
Obleserlab postdoc Mohsen Alavash and Obleserlab Alumna Sung-Joo Lim are in press at Neuroimage!
They argue with data from a placebo-controlled dopaminergic intervention study that BOLD signal variability and the functional connectome are surprisingly clearly affected by L‑Dopa, and (ii) that the degree of change in these metrics can explain the degree to which individuals will profit from L‑DOPA in performing the challenging listening task (while others dont; Preprint here ).
Alavash, M., Lim, S.J., Thiel, C., Sehm, B., Deserno, L., & Obleser, J. (2018) Dopaminergic modulation of hemodynamic signal variability and the functional connectome during cognitive performance. Neuroimage. In press.
— Thanks also and in particular to our colleagues Christiane Thiel of Oldenburg, and Bernhard Sehm and Lorenz Deserno of Leipzig, who helped us made this large-scale L‑DOPA project happen!