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: Linguistics
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
Very excited to announce that former Obleser lab PhD student Lea-Maria Schmitt with her co-authors *) is now out in the Journal Science Advances with her new work, fusing artifical neural networks and functional MRI data, on timescales of prediction in natural language comprehension:
“Predicting speech from a cortical hierarchy of event-based time scales”
*) Lea-Maria Schmitt, Julia Erb, Sarah Tune, and Jonas Obleser from the Obleser lab / Lübeck side, and our collaborators Anna Rysop and Gesa Hartwigsen from Gesa’s Lise Meitner group at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. This research was made possible by the ERC and the DFG.
Thanks to the @dfg_public and all involved for funding a new 630 K€ joint research endeavour of @GesaHartwigsen and @ObleserLab: “The impact of domain-general networks on natural language processing”. Postdoc and PhD trainee op’s upcoming at @MPI_CBS and @UniLuebeck soon.
— Jonas Obleser (@jonasobleser) June 2, 2021
I had the honour of guest-editing a special issue for the classic journal “Brain and Language” and have thus contributed a brief editorial (now online) to this issue. The special issue re-visits old themes and new leads in the electrophysiology of speech, language, and its precursors.
UPDATE: The full special issue appeared in September 2015 and all articles are now accessible and citable. Thanks for your kind attention!
Congratulations to just-graduated former AC PhD student and fresh GIPSA/Grenoble Postdoc Antje Strauß, who today had the last data set from her PhD thesis accepted as a paper in The Journal of Neuroscience. We are all very happy!
The paper is entitled “Alpha phase determines successful lexical decision in noise” and contains arguably the first data set to extend principles of (alpha, 8–12 Hz) pre-stimulus phase dependence from low-level psychophysics to more complex language or cognitive processes, here: lexical decision.
A big hello to AC friend and colleague Niko Busch, by the way, whose bifurcation index measure served our purposes very well here!
We will update accordingly, but meanwhile, here is the abstract and my favourite figure from the paper.
A new paper is about to appear in Neuroimage on
by Mathias Scharinger, Molly J. Henry, Jonas Obleser
[UPDATE] Link added.
References
- Scharinger M1, Henry MJ2, Obleser J2. Acoustic cue selection and discrimination under degradation: Differential contributions of the inferior parietal and posterior temporal cortices. Neuroimage. 2015 Feb 1;106:373–81. PMID: 25481793. [Open with Read]
In a collaboration with the University Clinic of Leipzig and Prof Dr Gesa Hartwigsen (now University of Kiel), a new paper is to appear in “Cortex”, in the forthcoming special issue on Prediction in Speech and Language, edited by Alessandro Tavano and AC alumnus Mathias Scharinger.
Hartwigsen G, Golombek T, & Obleser J.
Check it out soon!
References
- Hartwigsen G1, Golombek T2, Obleser J3. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation over left angular gyrus modulates the predictability gain in degraded speech comprehension. Cortex. 2014 Sep 18. PMID: 25444577. [Open with Read]