Category: Publications

Categories
Auditory Perception Clinical relevance Degraded Acoustics Effort Executive Functions Hearing Loss Papers Perception Psychology Speech perception Uncategorized

New paper in Trends in Hear­ing: Hear­ing aids add a demon­stra­ble amount of cog­ni­tive burden

A true Hoer­hanse col­labo: Markus Kem­per and our col­leagues from the Deutsche Hörg­eräte Insti­tut (DHI) show, with Jonas’ help, and using data acquired in our lab, that hear­ing aids do take their how­ev­er slight toll on the cog­ni­tive system: 

Despite the unques­tion­ably great help that hear­ing devices do pro­vide to those with impaired hear­ing, the tech­ni­cal noise and dig­i­tal sig­nal pro­cess­ing chain of hear­ing aids do ampli­fy mea­sur­ably the typ­i­cal sig­na­tures of effort­ful listening.

Espe­cial­ly the pupil dila­tion, hall­mark of increased locus coeruleus/noradrenergic activ­i­ty in response to sensory–cognitive chal­lenges, is notably more pro­nounced when lis­ten­ers respond to a stan­dard speech-intell­gi­bil­i­ty test (OLSA) while lis­ten­ing through a “trans­par­ent” (i.e., switched-on, but not ampli­fy­ing) hear­ing aid.

Out now in Trends in Hear­ing.

Categories
Adaptive Control EEG / MEG Evoked Activity Linguistics Neural dynamics Papers Semantics Uncategorized

New paper in Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science: Mamash­li et al.

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.

Categories
Computational Modelling Media Uncategorized

Jonas has become a mem­ber of the Bern­stein Network

As of today, I am hon­oured to have become a mem­ber of the Bern­stein Net­work Com­pu­ta­tion­al Neu­ro­science.

The Bern­stein Net­work Com­pu­ta­tion­al Neu­ro­science brings togeth­er over 200 research groups and 450 indi­vid­ual sci­en­tists world­wide, facil­i­tat­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion between exper­i­men­tal neu­ro­science, the­o­ret­i­cal mod­el­ing, and com­put­er sim­u­la­tion. Estab­lished in 2004 through fund­ing by the Ger­man Fed­er­al Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion and Research (BMBF), the net­work aims to trans­late the­o­ret­i­cal neu­ro­science into clin­i­cal and tech­ni­cal applications.

Categories
Auditory Neuroscience Papers

New paper in the Euro­pean Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science: Neur­al Effects of Dis­trac­tor Pre­dictabil­i­ty Depend on Load

Out now in EJN: Tro­by Lui, Jonas Obleser, & Malte Wöst­mann show that the lis­ten­ing brain extracts sub­tle sta­tis­ti­cal reg­u­lar­i­ties from a sequence of irrel­e­vant speech items. Pre­dic­tion of dis­trac­tors is not ful­ly auto­mat­ic but depends on the avail­abil­i­ty of per­cep­tu­al and cog­ni­tive resources. We believe that these find­ings help under­stand poten­tial ben­e­fits of pre­dictable dis­trac­tors for goal-direct­ed neur­al pro­cess­ing and its depen­dence on per­cep­tu­al and cog­ni­tive resource limitations.

 

This is the final study of Malte’s DFG project Under­stand­ing the tem­po­ral dynam­ics of the audi­to­ry atten­tion­al fil­ter. PhD can­di­date Max Schulz and Malte are already busy work­ing on the fol­low up project Under­stand­ing cap­ture and sup­pres­sion in audi­to­ry atten­tion. Stay tuned for more insights into the intri­cate dynam­ics of attention!

Categories
Editorial Notes Publications

Jonas Obleser appoint­ed as senior edi­tor for the Jour­nal of Neuroscience

Start­ing Jan­u­ary 1, 2025, Jonas Obleser will serve as a Senior Edi­tor for The Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science. This pres­ti­gious role, ini­tial­ly set for three years with an option to extend, places him at the core of the edi­to­r­i­al team, under the lead­er­ship of renowned Ger­man-Amer­i­can neu­ro­sci­en­tist Sabine Kast­ner (Prince­ton).

As Senior Edi­tor, Jonas will over­see the assign­ment of sub­mit­ted man­u­scripts to review­ing edi­tors and coor­di­nate the peer-review process with experts world­wide. The senior edi­tor issues deci­sions regard­ing the accep­tance, revi­sion, or rejec­tion of sci­en­tif­ic papers.

The Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science ranks among the top five most-cit­ed neu­ro­science jour­nals glob­al­ly. It has pub­lished peer-reviewed research for over 40 years and serves as the offi­cial jour­nal of the Soci­ety for Neu­ro­science (SfN), the largest organ­i­sa­tion ded­i­cat­ed to under­stand­ing the brain and ner­vous sys­tem, with near­ly 37,000 mem­bers in over 90 countries.

Categories
Acoustics Attention Auditory Neuroscience Events Media Neural Filters Publications Speech perception

Mar­tin Orf receives EUHA Award for Out­stand­ing Thesis

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 behav­iour­al process­es behind selec­tive atten­tion in com­plex lis­ten­ing envi­ron­ments. A key find­ing of his research is that the neur­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of attend­ed speech becomes stronger when a com­pet­ing, ignored speech stream is being com­pressed in its dynam­ics (a very com­mon yet ill-under­stood sig­nal pro­cess­ing tech­nique in audio pro­duc­tion and also in hear­ing devices). Martin’s dis­cov­ery could con­tribute to the devel­op­ment of future hear­ing aid algo­rithms and in the refine­ment  of exist­ing ones.

Categories
Auf deutsch Editorial Notes Media Uncategorized Website

Der neue Hör-Newslet­ter ist da

Unsere diesjährige Aus­gabe des Hör-Newslet­ter mit eini­gen Neuigkeit­en aus Lübeck und aus unserem Forschungsla­bor ist da. Viel Spaß beim Stöbern!

Categories
Ageing Attention Grants Neural dynamics Neural Filters Papers Psychology

New paper in eLife: Brain and behav­iour go sep­a­rate ways in the age­ing listener

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!