Martin Orf is one of three recipients of this year’s EUHA Award for Outstanding Thesis from the European Union of Hearing Acousticians. His thesis, titled “Selective Attention in Multi-Talker Situations: Neural and Behavioral Mechanisms”, offers valuable insights into the neural and behavioral processes behind selective attention in complex listening environments. A key finding of his research is that the neural representation of the target language becomes stronger when the ignored language is more compressed. This discoveryplay a crucial role in the development of new hearing aid algorithms or the enhancement of existing ones.
Category: Publications
Unsere diesjährige Ausgabe des Hör-Newsletter mit einigen Neuigkeiten aus Lübeck und aus unserem Forschungslabor ist da. Viel Spaß beim Stöbern!
Out now in eLife: Obleserlab stats modelling wiz Sarah Tune together with Jonas has just published a serious statistical piece of evidence on how, in our >N=100 cohort of ageing listeners as funded by the European Research Council, neural signatures of attentive listening and the actual behavioural outcome a listener achieves are not trivially connected, and in fact are not even predictive of one another – when we look at the longitudinal, two-year trajectory that listeners exhibit in both measures over time.
This study (here is a brief eLife digest on it) poses a keystone result to the ERC project “AUDADAPT”, which we now continue with other projects and spin-offs. Many thanks to the large group of Lübeck citizens who continue to support us with their precious time and their brain and behavioural data!
Diese Studie (hier ist eine kurze eLife-Zusammenfassung) ist ein Schlüsselergebnis des ERC-Projekts “AUDADAPT”, das wir nun mit anderen Projekten und Spin-offs fortsetzen. Vielen Dank an die große Gruppe von Lübecker Bürgerinnen und Bürgern, die uns weiterhin mit ihrer kostbaren Zeit und ihren Gehirn- und Verhaltensdaten unterstützen!
Twenty-twentythree has probably not been our most prolific year in terms of putting out new research findings, which in part is an interesting delayed consequence of the lab close-down/slow-down in the pandemic years. But …
… here we are in autumn 2023 with no less than three fresh findings and perspectives:
First, graduate trainee Frauke Kraus has published in the Society for Neuroscience outlet eNeuro her new findings on how motivational state is able to affect listening behaviour and listening effort (as proxied by pupil dilation).
Second, with our colleagues from the translational psychiatry unit, mainly Christina Andreou and Stefan Borgwardt, Jonas contributed to an umbrella review on the most likely candidate predictors of an individual at risk transitioning into psychosis, in the Journal Translational Psychiatry (a spin-off by the marketing geniuses at Nature Springer) – the umbrella review poses a corollary of our joint work on hallucinations and meta-cognition in normal and aberrant perception (stay tuned for more on that one!).
Not least, a new review and a true collaborative effort from many neuroscience colleagues here at the University of Lübeck led by Nico Bunzeck, we are arguing in Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Reviews that pathological aging might begin in earnest when and if the typical/healthy functional compensation for brain structural decline breaks down. Check it out.
References
- PMID: 38040075. [Open with Read]
- PMID: 37989588. [Open with Read]
- PMID: 37640731. [Open with Read]
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.
Sleep is central for our ability to transform newly acquired information into stable memory traces. A process hypothesized to be mediated by unique brain oscillations found solely during sleep, first in foremost the <1 Hz slow oscillation, which initiate a reactivation of the information to be consolidated. But what is the temporal relation between sleep slow oscillations and memory reactivation?
Together with Bernhard Staresina from the University of Oxford, Hong-Viet V. Ngo recently published a study utilizing targeted memory reactivation (TMR): a technique to externally drive reactivation by exposing sleeping subjects to auditory reminder cues. Using this approach, they compared the impact of slow oscillation phase on the TMR outcome, i.e. they contrasted a cueing phase-locked to slow oscillation peaks (up-states) vs. cues presenting during slow oscillation troughs (or down-states). Their results show that up-state cueing led to a significantly lower forgetting than down-state cueing. Moreover, electrophysiological brain patterns reflecting reactivated information were more pronounced after up-state cueing. Altogether these results provide important insight for the endeavor to experimentally modulate memories during sleep.
You can find the full article here.
A ticking clock in the living room; an ambient music in the café; the footsteps of a passersby on the street – We are surrounded by a plethora of distracting events with regular temporal structures in daily life. Can we ignore these distractors better?
Troby Ka-Yan Lui and Malte Wöstmann recently published a study on the effect of temporally regular versus irregular distractors on the ability to maintain items in memory. Surprisingly, they found that the temporal regularity of distractors did not have an effect on participant’s memory performance. Instead, they found an effect of the temporal regularity of distractors on response behaviour – participants were faster and more biased in responding whether the current number matched with the number in memory.
These results have theoretical implications: external distraction may have a more pervasive influence on different aspects of cognitive processes than memory maintenance. The article will soon be available in Scientific Reports.
Attention lets us focus our limited cognitive resources on behaviorally important information. Less obvious is that attention also helps us to hold information in memory with high precision. But how does the brain implement this directed attention to memory, and what behavioural benefits does it yield for us humans?
Former postdoc Sung-Joo Lim (now at Binghamton University), Jonas Obleser, and a team of collaborators from Oldenburg (Christiane Thiel) and Leipzig (Bernhard Sehm, Lorenz Deserno, and Jöran Lepsien) have now a new article on this old problem, to appear in NeuroImage.
Using the changes in brain blood oxygenation as measured with fMRI, this study demonstrates that attention enables memory maintenance of speech sound information across multiple brain regions. A speech-sensitive brain region in the temporal lobe (the left superior temporal sulcus) contributes the most in predicting the individual gain in recall precision of auditory objects from memory. This study highlights that functionally discrete brain regions work together in maintaining and attentionally enhancing working memory information, but they exert differental influences depending on their functional specializations.
The full article is now available here.
