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Category: Hearing Loss

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Ageing Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Degraded Acoustics EEG / MEG Evoked Activity Hearing Loss Papers Psychology Publications Speech

New paper in press: Wöst­mann, Schröger, & Obleser in J Cogn Neurosci

Con­grat­u­la­tion to PhD stu­dent Malte Wöst­mann, who – with Erich Schröger and Jonas Obleser – has a new arti­cle in press at the Jour­nal of Cog­ni­tive Neuroscience

Acoustic detail guides atten­tion allo­ca­tion in a selec­tive lis­ten­ing task

forth­com­ing. We will update you accord­ing­ly as the paper comes online. We will share how­ev­er one of Malte’s fig­ures here as a teas­er: The paper utilis­es a very clas­sic com­po­nent of the evoked poten­tial, the con­tin­gent neg­a­tive vari­a­tion (the CNV; or a close rel­a­tive there­of, see the actu­al paper for dis­cus­sion) to study how old­er and younger lis­ten­ers allo­cate their atten­tion­al resources depend­ing on implic­it cues on to-be-expect­ed lis­ten­ing difficulties.

Screen Shot 2014-10-19 at 19.37.43

Ref­er­ences

  • Wöst­mann M1, Schröger E, Obleser J. Acoustic Detail Guides Atten­tion Allo­ca­tion in a Selec­tive Lis­ten­ing Task. J Cogn Neu­rosci. 2014 Nov 12:1–13. PMID: 25390200. [Open with Read]
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Ageing Auditory Perception Degraded Acoustics EEG / MEG Hearing Loss Neural Oscillations Papers Perception Publications Speech

Strauß strikes again — fron­tiers in Human Neuroscience

It’s only a week ago that we updat­ed you about Antje’s lat­est pub­li­ca­tion at Neu­roIm­age. Today, there is a anoth­er one com­ing in; Antje’s, Mal­te’s & Jonas’ per­spec­tive arti­cle on cor­ti­cal alpha oscil­la­tions is in press at fron­tiers in HUMAN NEUROSCIENCE.

Cor­ti­cal alpha oscil­la­tions as a tool for audi­to­ry selec­tive inhibition

— Strauß, Wöst­mann & Obleser

See abstract
Lis­ten­ing to speech is often demand­ing because of sig­nal degra­da­tions and the pres­ence of dis­tract­ing sounds (i.e., “noise”). The ques­tion how the brain achieves the task of extract­ing only rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion from the mix­ture of sounds reach­ing the ear (i.e., “cock­tail par­ty prob­lem”) is still open. In anal­o­gy to recent find­ings in vision, we pro­pose cor­ti­cal alpha (~10 Hz) oscil­la­tions mea­sur­able using M/EEG as a piv­otal mech­a­nism to selec­tive­ly inhib­it the pro­cess­ing of noise to improve audi­to­ry selec­tive atten­tion to task-rel­e­vant sig­nals. We review ini­tial evi­dence of enhanced alpha activ­i­ty in selec­tive lis­ten­ing tasks, sug­gest­ing a sig­nif­i­cant role of alpha-mod­u­lat­ed noise sup­pres­sion in speech. We dis­cuss the impor­tance of dis­so­ci­at­ing between noise inter­fer­ence in the audi­to­ry periph­ery (i.e., ener­getic mask­ing) and noise inter­fer­ence with more cen­tral cog­ni­tive aspects of speech pro­cess­ing (i.e., infor­ma­tion­al mask­ing). Final­ly, we point out the adverse effects of age-relat­ed hear­ing loss and/or cog­ni­tive decline on audi­to­ry selec­tive inhi­bi­tion. With this per­spec­tive arti­cle, we set the stage for future stud­ies on the inhibito­ry role of alpha oscil­la­tions for speech pro­cess­ing in chal­leng­ing lis­ten­ing situations.

Ref­er­ences

  • Strauß A1, Wöst­mann M2, Obleser J1. Cor­ti­cal alpha oscil­la­tions as a tool for audi­to­ry selec­tive inhi­bi­tion. Front Hum Neu­rosci. 2014 May 28;8:350. PMID: 24904385. [Open with Read]
Categories
Ageing Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Speech Processing Clinical relevance Degraded Acoustics Executive Functions fMRI Hearing Loss Noise-Vocoded Speech Papers Publications Speech

New paper in press: Erb & Obleser, Fron­tiers in Sys­tems Neuroscience

Julia Erb just got accept­ed the third study of her PhD project,

Upreg­u­la­tion of cog­ni­tive con­trol net­works in old­er adults’ speech comprehension

It will appear in Fron­tiers in Sys­tems Neu­ro­science soon.

The data are an exten­sion (in old­er adults) of Julia’s Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science paper ear­li­er this year.

Ref­er­ences

  • Erb J, Obleser J. Upreg­u­la­tion of cog­ni­tive con­trol net­works in old­er adults’ speech com­pre­hen­sion. Front Syst Neu­rosci. 2013 Dec 24;7:116. PMID: 24399939. [Open with Read]
Categories
Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Clinical relevance EEG / MEG Evoked Activity Hearing Loss Papers Psychology Publications

New paper in press: Her­rmann et al., Hear­ing Research [Update]

Audi­to­ry fil­ter width affects response mag­ni­tude but not fre­quen­cy speci­fici­ty in audi­to­ry cortex

This is fan­tas­tic news on a fri­day morn­ing: Obleser lab Post­doc Björn Her­rmann teamed up with his fel­low Post­docs Math­ias Scharinger and Mol­ly Hen­ry to study how spec­tral analy­sis in the audi­to­ry periph­ery (termed fre­quen­cy selec­tiv­i­ty) relates to pro­cess­ing in audi­to­ry cor­tex (termed fre­quen­cy speci­fici­ty; see also Björns paper in J Neu­ro­phys­i­ol 2013).

Giv­ing this an age­ing and hear­ing loss per­spec­tive and build­ing on the con­cept of audi­to­ry fil­ters in the cochlea (Moore et al.), Björn found that  the over­all N1 ampli­tude of lis­ten­ers, but not their fre­quen­cy-spe­cif­ic neur­al adap­ta­tion pat­terns, is cor­re­lat­ed with the pass-band of the audi­to­ry filter.

This sug­gests that widened audi­to­ry fil­ters are com­pen­sat­ed for by a response gain in fre­quen­cy-spe­cif­ic areas of audi­to­ry cor­tex; the paper is in press and forth­com­ing in Hear­ing Research.

 

Update:

Paper is avail­able online.

Ref­er­ences

  • Her­rmann B, Hen­ry MJ, Scharinger M, Obleser J. Audi­to­ry fil­ter width affects response mag­ni­tude but not fre­quen­cy speci­fici­ty in audi­to­ry cor­tex. Hear Res. 2013 Oct;304:128–36. PMID: 23876524. [Open with Read]