Category: Adaptive Control

Categories
Adaptive Control Ageing Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience EEG / MEG Evoked Activity Executive Functions Neural Oscillations Neural Phase Papers Perception Publications

New paper in press: Hen­ry et al., Nature Communications

Here comes a new paper in Nature Com­mu­ni­ca­tions by for­mer AC post­doc Mol­ly Hen­ry, with for­mer fel­low post­doc AC alum­nus Björn Her­rmann, our tire­less lab man­ag­er, Dun­ja Kunke, and myself! It is a late (to us quite impor­tant) result from our lab’s tenure at the Max Planck in Leipzig, 

Hen­ry, M.J., Her­rmann, B., Kunke, D., Obleser, J. (In press). Aging affects the bal­ance of neur­al entrain­ment and top-down neur­al mod­u­la­tion in the lis­ten­ing brain. Nature Communications. 

—Con­grat­u­la­tions, Molly!

Categories
Adaptive Control Attention Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Auditory Speech Processing Degraded Acoustics EEG / MEG Evoked Activity Executive Functions Neural Oscillations Noise-Vocoded Speech Papers Perception Psychology Publications Speech

New paper in press in Cere­bral Cor­tex: Wöst­mann et al. on ignor­ing degrad­ed speech

Audi­to­ry Cognition’s own Malte Wöst­mann is in press in Cere­bral Cor­tex with his lat­est offer­ing on how atten­tion­al con­trol man­i­fests in alpha pow­er changes: Ignor­ing speech can be ben­e­fi­cial (if com­pre­hend­ing speech poten­tial­ly detracts from anoth­er task), and we here show how this change in lis­ten­ing goals turns around the pat­tern of alpha-pow­er changes with chang­ing speech degra­da­tion. (We will update as the paper becomes avail­able online.)

Wöst­mann, M., Lim, S.J., & Obleser, J. (2017). The human neur­al alpha response to speech is a proxy of atten­tion­al con­trol. Cere­bral Cor­tex. In press.

 

Abstract
Human alpha (~10 Hz) oscil­la­to­ry pow­er is a promi­nent neur­al mark­er of cog­ni­tive effort. When lis­ten­ers attempt to process and retain acousti­cal­ly degrad­ed speech, alpha pow­er enhances. It is unclear whether these alpha mod­u­la­tions reflect the degree of acoustic degra­da­tion per se or the degra­da­tion-dri­ven demand to a listener’s atten­tion­al con­trol. Using an irrel­e­vant-speech par­a­digm in elec­troen­cephalog­ra­phy (EEG), the cur­rent exper­i­ment demon­strates that the neur­al alpha response to speech is a sur­pris­ing­ly clear proxy of top-down con­trol, entire­ly dri­ven by the lis­ten­ing goals of attend­ing ver­sus ignor­ing degrad­ed speech. While (n=23) lis­ten­ers retained the ser­i­al order of 9 to-be-recalled dig­its, one to-be-ignored sen­tence was pre­sent­ed. Dis­tractibil­i­ty of the to-be-ignored sen­tence para­met­ri­cal­ly var­ied in acoustic detail (noise-vocod­ing), with more acoustic detail of dis­tract­ing speech increas­ing­ly dis­rupt­ing lis­ten­ers’ ser­i­al mem­o­ry recall. Where pre­vi­ous stud­ies had observed decreas­es in pari­etal and audi­to­ry alpha pow­er with more acoustic detail (of tar­get speech), alpha pow­er here showed the oppo­site pat­tern and increased with more acoustic detail in the speech dis­trac­tor. In sum, the neur­al alpha response reflects almost exclu­sive­ly a listener’s exer­tion of atten­tion­al con­trol, which is deci­sive for whether more acoustic detail facil­i­tates com­pre­hen­sion (of attend­ed speech) or enhances dis­trac­tion (of ignored speech).
Categories
Adaptive Control Degraded Acoustics Grants Gyrus Angularis Semantics Speech TMS Uncategorized

New project with Gesa Hartwigsen (Max Planck Leipzig): What is Angu­lar Gyrus actu­al­ly up to?

San­ta struck ear­ly this year: The Deutsche Forschungs­ge­mein­schaft (DFG) has just grant­ed AC head Jonas (Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck) and brain-stim­u­la­tion wiz Gesa Hartwigsen (now a group leader at AC’s for­mer insti­tu­tion, the MPI in Leipzig) a joint 3‑year grant, worth 371,000 € in total, on “Mod­u­lat­ing neur­al net­work dynam­ics of speech com­pre­hen­sion: The role of the angu­lar gyrus”. This project will build on Gesa and Jonas’ recent paper in Cor­tex on the top­ic. Thanks again to the fund­ing body and the help­ful reviewers!

Categories
Adaptive Control Auditory Neuroscience EEG / MEG Evoked Activity Hearing Loss Neural Phase Perception Preprints (not peer-reviewed yet) Publications Speech Uncategorized

New preprint paper: Fiedler et al. on pre­dict­ing focus of atten­tion from in-ear EEG

Very proud: PhD stu­dent Lorenz Fiedler goes live (pre-peer-review) with his work of pre­dict­ing the focus of atten­tion in sin­gle-chan­nel/­for­ward mod­els in in-ear EEG!
Here is the preprint of the paper, which now will under­go peer-review. Thanks for check­ing it out!

In-Ear results Fiedler

Categories
Adaptive Control Ageing EEG / MEG Executive Functions fMRI Job Offers

We’ll be hir­ing soon: Post­docs wanted

The research group “Audi­to­ry Cog­ni­tion” (head­ed by Prof. Dr. Jonas Obleser; auditorycognition.com) in the recent­ly estab­lished Depart­ment of Psy­chol­o­gy, Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck, is seek­ing to hire several

Post­doc­tor­al Researchers

start­ing by Jan­u­ary 2016, ini­tial­ly for 3 years, with the option of a 2‑year exten­sion. These posi­tions will fall into the larg­er frame­work of an ERC Con­sol­ida­tor grant “The lis­ten­ing chal­lenge: How age­ing brains adapt” recent­ly award­ed to Jonas Obleser, and will allow the joint devel­op­ment of cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science and psy­cho­log­i­cal research projects tar­get­ing adap­tive con­trol in the audi­to­ry modal­i­ty of mid­dle-aged adults.

[About the ERC project: The audi­to­ry sen­so­ry modal­i­ty pos­es an excel­lent, although under-utilised, research mod­el to under­stand the cog­ni­tive adjust­ments to sen­so­ry change (here termed “adap­tive con­trol”), their neur­al basis, and their large vari­a­tion amongst indi­vid­u­als. Hear­ing abil­i­ties begin to decline already in the fourth life decade, and our guid­ing hypoth­e­sis is that indi­vid­u­als dif­fer in the extent to which they are neu­ral­ly, cog­ni­tive­ly, and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly equipped to adapt to this sen­so­ry decline.]

We are look­ing for cre­ative minds with a PhD degree and a promis­ing track record in cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science, psy­chol­o­gy, physics, or engi­neer­ing. A strong back­ground and inter­est in research meth­ods is desir­able. Pri­or expe­ri­ence with either human neu­ro­science meth­ods (espe­cial­ly advanced EEG and/or fMRI analy­ses) or mod­el­ing of rich data sets (e.g., latent growth mod­el­ing, struc­tur­al equa­tion mod­el­ing) is expected.

The Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck is a mod­ern uni­ver­si­ty spe­cial­iz­ing in Med­i­cine, Com­put­er Sci­ence, Mol­e­c­u­lar Biol­o­gy, Bio­math­e­mat­ics and Med­ical Engi­neer­ing. Inter­na­tion­al­ly renowned research and high stan­dards of aca­d­e­m­ic tutor­ing char­ac­ter­ize the pro­file of the uni­ver­si­ty. A new ded­i­cat­ed research build­ing (Cen­tre for Brain, Behav­iour, and Metab­o­lism; CBBM) hous­ing also the Obleser lab will open in late 2015.

Pay­ment will fol­low salary group E13 TV‑L (full time), if con­di­tions based on Ger­man Pub­lic ser­vice reg­u­la­tions are satisfied.

 

These posi­tions will be announced offi­cial­ly lat­er in autumn 2015, but inter­est­ed can­di­dates should be in touch now with Jonas Obleser, jonas.obleser@uni-luebeck.de