web analytics

Category: Psychology

Categories
Ageing Auditory Neuroscience Editorial Notes Hearing Loss Psychology

New research fund­ing: joint project with WSA

I am hap­py and hon­oured that one of the lead­ing hear­ing aid devel­op­ers and man­u­fac­tur­ers, Widex Sivan­tos Audi­ol­o­gy (WSA), has agreed with Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck to fund 3 more excit­ing years of research at the Obleser lab! We will be joint­ly look­ing at the intri­ca­cies of how age­ing lis­ten­ers nav­i­gate a noisy world and its com­mu­ni­ca­tion challenges.

Categories
Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Brain stimulation Clinical relevance Neural Oscillations Papers Psychiatry Psychology Voice

New Review paper on Cir­ca­di­an Rhythms in Audi­to­ry Hal­lu­ci­na­tions and Psy­chosis to come out in “Acta Physiologica”

As part of our increased efforts to under­stand the impact of chrono­bi­ol­o­gy in sen­sa­tion and per­cep­tion, a new review arti­cle by senior researcher Hong-Viet Ngo in the lab and Jonas Obleser, togeth­er with psy­chi­a­trist Christi­na Andreou and chrononeu­ro­phys­i­ol­o­gist Hen­rik Oster is forthcoming!

The paper sum­maris­es our (sketchy) knowl­edge on how cir­ca­di­an rhythms impact audi­to­ry hal­lu­ci­na­tion propen­si­ty, and how key neur­al sig­na­tures E:I (dys-)balance and dopamin­er­gic sig­nalling joint­ly might con­tribute to hal­lu­ci­na­tions as a key symp­tom in  psy­chosis. The paper has been accept­ed in the clas­sic jour­nal Acta Phys­i­o­log­i­ca. A preprint ver­sion is avail­able here.

Categories
Papers Psychology Publications

New paper in Roy­al Soci­ety Open Sci­ence, Wöst­mann et al.

Malte Wöst­mann, Julia Erb, Jens Kre­it­e­wolf, and Jonas Obleser con­duct­ed a large-scale online study to explore the rela­tion­ship between lis­ten­ers’ per­son­al­i­ty and hear­ing-in-noise. In a large sam­ple (N = 1,103), they found that BIG‑5 per­son­al­i­ty dimen­sions neu­roti­cism and extra­ver­sion explained dis­so­ci­a­tions of scores on estab­lished sub­jec­tive ver­sus objec­tive hear­ing-in-noise tests. This research was sup­port­ed by the Inter­na­tion­al Hear­ing Foundation.

The full arti­cle is avail­able here.

Categories
Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Speech Processing fMRI Linguistics Papers Perception Psychology Semantics Speech Uncategorized

New paper in Sci­ence Advances by Schmitt et al.

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.

 

Categories
Ageing Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception fMRI Hearing Loss Papers Perception Psychology Publications

New paper in eLife: Erb et al., Tem­po­ral selec­tiv­i­ty declines in the aging human audi­to­ry cortex

Con­grat­u­la­tions to Oble­ser­lab post­doc Julia Erb for her new paper to appear in eLife, “Tem­po­ral selec­tiv­i­ty declines in the aging human audi­to­ry cor­tex”.

It’s a trope that old­er lis­ten­ers strug­gle more in com­pre­hend­ing speech (think of Pro­fes­sor Tour­nesol in the famous Tintin comics!). The neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy of why and how age­ing and speech com­pre­hen­sion dif­fi­cul­ties are linked at all has proven much more elu­sive, however.

Part of this lack of knowl­edge is direct­ly root­ed in our lim­it­ed under­stand­ing of how the cen­tral parts of the hear­ing brain – audi­to­ry cor­tex, broad­ly speak­ing – are organized.

Does audi­to­ry cor­tex of old­er adults have dif­fer­ent tun­ing prop­er­ties? That is, do young and old­er adults dif­fer in the way their audi­to­ry sub­fields rep­re­sent cer­tain fea­tures of sound?

A spe­cif­ic hypoth­e­sis fol­low­ing from this, derived from what is known about age-relat­ed change in neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal process­es in gen­er­al (the idea of so-called “ded­if­fer­en­ti­a­tion”), was that the tun­ing to cer­tain fea­tures would “broad­en” and thus lose selec­tiv­i­ty in old­er com­pared to younger listeners.

More mech­a­nis­ti­cal­ly, we aimed to not only observe so-called “cross-sec­tion­al” (i.e., age-group) dif­fer­ences, but to link a listener’s chrono­log­i­cal age as close­ly as pos­si­ble to changes in cor­ti­cal tuning.

Amongst old­er lis­ten­ers, we observe that tem­po­ral-rate selec­tiv­i­ty declines with high­er age. In line with senes­cent neur­al ded­if­fer­en­ti­a­tion more gen­er­al­ly, our results high­light decreased selec­tiv­i­ty to tem­po­ral infor­ma­tion as a hall­mark of the aging audi­to­ry cortex.

This research is gen­er­ous­ly sup­port­ed by the ERC Con­sol­ida­tor project AUDADAPT, and data for this study were acquired at the CBBM at Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck.

Categories
Attention Auditory Neuroscience Neural Oscillations Papers Psychology Uncategorized

New paper in press in the Jour­nal of Neuroscience

Wöst­mann, Alavash and Obleser demon­strate that alpha oscil­la­tions in the human brain imple­ment dis­trac­tor sup­pres­sion inde­pen­dent of tar­get selection.

In the­o­ry, the abil­i­ty to selec­tive­ly focus on rel­e­vant objects in our envi­ron­ment bases on selec­tion of tar­gets and sup­pres­sion of dis­trac­tion. As it is unclear whether tar­get selec­tion and dis­trac­tor sup­pres­sion are inde­pen­dent, we designed an Elec­troen­cephalog­ra­phy (EEG) study to direct­ly con­trast these two processes.

Par­tic­i­pants per­formed a pitch dis­crim­i­na­tion task on a tone sequence pre­sent­ed at one loud­speak­er loca­tion while a dis­tract­ing tone sequence was pre­sent­ed at anoth­er loca­tion. When the dis­trac­tor was fixed in the front, atten­tion to upcom­ing tar­gets on the left ver­sus right side induced hemi­spher­ic lat­er­al­i­sa­tion of alpha pow­er with rel­a­tive­ly high­er pow­er ipsi- ver­sus con­tralat­er­al to the side of attention.

Crit­i­cal­ly, when the tar­get was fixed in front, sup­pres­sion of upcom­ing dis­trac­tors reversed the pat­tern of alpha lat­er­al­i­sa­tion, that is, alpha pow­er increased con­tralat­er­al to the dis­trac­tor and decreased ipsi­lat­er­al­ly. Since the two lat­er­al­ized alpha respons­es were uncor­re­lat­ed across par­tic­i­pants, they can be con­sid­ered large­ly inde­pen­dent cog­ni­tive mechanisms.

This was fur­ther sup­port­ed by the fact that alpha lat­er­al­i­sa­tion in response to dis­trac­tor sup­pres­sion orig­i­nat­ed in more ante­ri­or, frontal cor­ti­cal regions com­pared with tar­get selec­tion (see figure).

The paper is also avail­able as preprint here.

 

Categories
Attention Auditory Cortex Auditory Speech Processing EEG / MEG Psychology Speech

AC post­doc Malte Wöst­mann scores DFG grant to study the tem­po­ral dynam­ics of the audi­to­ry atten­tion­al filter

In this three-year project, we will use the audi­to­ry modal­i­ty as a test case to inves­ti­gate how the sup­pres­sion of dis­tract­ing infor­ma­tion (i.e., “fil­ter­ing”) is neu­ral­ly imple­ment­ed. While it is known that the atten­tion­al sam­pling of tar­gets (a) is rhyth­mic, (b) can be entrained, and © is mod­u­lat­ed by top-down pre­dic­tions, the exis­tence and neur­al imple­men­ta­tion of these mech­a­nisms for the sup­pres­sion of dis­trac­tors is at present unclear. To test this, we will use adap­ta­tions of estab­lished behav­iour­al par­a­digms of dis­trac­tor sup­pres­sion and record­ings of human elec­tro­phys­i­o­log­i­cal sig­nals in the Magen­to-/ Elec­troen­cephalo­gram (M/EEG).

Abstract of research project:

Back­ground: Goal-direct­ed behav­iour in tem­po­ral­ly dynam­ic envi­ron­ments requires to focus on rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion and to not get dis­tract­ed by irrel­e­vant infor­ma­tion. To achieve this, two cog­ni­tive process­es are nec­es­sary: On the one hand, atten­tion­al sam­pling of tar­get stim­uli has been focus of exten­sive research. On the oth­er hand, it is less well known how the human neur­al sys­tem exploits tem­po­ral infor­ma­tion in the stim­u­lus to fil­ter out dis­trac­tion. In the present project, we use the audi­to­ry modal­i­ty as a test case to study the tem­po­ral dynam­ics of atten­tion­al fil­ter­ing and its neur­al implementation.

Approach and gen­er­al hypoth­e­sis: In three vari­ants of the “Irrel­e­vant-Sound Task” we will manip­u­late tem­po­ral aspects of audi­to­ry dis­trac­tors. Behav­iour­al recall of tar­get stim­uli despite dis­trac­tion and respons­es in the elec­troen­cephalo­gram (EEG) will reflect the integri­ty and neur­al imple­men­ta­tion of the atten­tion­al fil­ter. In line with pre­lim­i­nary research, our gen­er­al hypoth­e­sis is that atten­tion­al fil­ter­ing bases on sim­i­lar but sign-reversed mech­a­nisms as atten­tion­al sam­pling: For instance, while atten­tion to rhyth­mic stim­uli increas­es neur­al sen­si­tiv­i­ty at time points of expect­ed tar­get occur­rence, fil­ter­ing of dis­trac­tors should instead decrease neur­al sen­si­tiv­i­ty at the time of expect­ed distraction.

Work pro­gramme: In each one of three Work Pack­ages (WPs), we will take as a mod­el an estab­lished neur­al mech­a­nism of atten­tion­al sam­pling and test the exis­tence and neur­al imple­men­ta­tion of a sim­i­lar mech­a­nism for atten­tion­al fil­ter­ing. This way, we will inves­ti­gate whether atten­tion­al fil­ter­ing fol­lows an intrin­sic rhythm (WP1), whether rhyth­mic dis­trac­tors can entrain atten­tion­al fil­ter­ing (WP2), and whether fore­knowl­edge about the time of dis­trac­tion induces top-down tun­ing of the atten­tion­al fil­ter in frontal cor­tex regions (WP3).

Objec­tives and rel­e­vance: The pri­ma­ry objec­tive of this research is to con­tribute to the foun­da­tion­al sci­ence on human selec­tive atten­tion, which requires a com­pre­hen­sive under­stand­ing of how the neur­al sys­tem achieves the task of fil­ter­ing out dis­trac­tion. Fur­ther­more, hear­ing dif­fi­cul­ties often base on dis­trac­tion by salient but irrel­e­vant sound. Results of this research will trans­late to the devel­op­ment of hear­ing aids that take into account neu­ro-cog­ni­tive mech­a­nisms to fil­ter out dis­trac­tion more efficiently.

Categories
Attention Auditory Cortex Auditory Speech Processing Papers Psychology Publications Speech

New paper in press in the Jour­nal of Cog­ni­tive Neuroscience

Wöst­mann, Schmitt and Obleser demon­strate that clos­ing the eyes enhances the atten­tion­al mod­u­la­tion of neur­al alpha pow­er but does not affect behav­iour­al per­for­mance in two lis­ten­ing tasks

Does clos­ing the eyes enhance our abil­i­ty to lis­ten atten­tive­ly? In fact, many of us tend to close their eyes when lis­ten­ing con­di­tions become chal­leng­ing, for exam­ple on the phone. It is thus sur­pris­ing that there is no pub­lished work on the behav­iour­al or neur­al con­se­quences of clos­ing the eyes dur­ing atten­tive lis­ten­ing. In the present study, we demon­strate that eye clo­sure does not only increase the over­all lev­el of absolute alpha pow­er but also the degree to which audi­to­ry atten­tion mod­u­lates alpha pow­er over time in syn­chrony with attend­ing to ver­sus ignor­ing speech. How­ev­er, our behav­iour­al results pro­vide evi­dence for the absence of any dif­fer­ence in lis­ten­ing per­for­mance with closed ver­sus open eyes. The like­ly rea­son for this is that the impact of eye clo­sure on neur­al oscil­la­to­ry dynam­ics does not match alpha pow­er mod­u­la­tions asso­ci­at­ed with lis­ten­ing per­for­mance pre­cise­ly enough (see figure).

The paper is avail­able as preprint here.