On this years SPIN (Speech in Noise) workshop in Marseille, our very own Malte Wöstmann received the Colin Cherry Best Poster Award, elected by workshop attendees.
Judge for yourself and check out the Poster (PDF) here.

On this years SPIN (Speech in Noise) workshop in Marseille, our very own Malte Wöstmann received the Colin Cherry Best Poster Award, elected by workshop attendees.
Judge for yourself and check out the Poster (PDF) here.
Björn Herrmann has yet another paper in press in the Journal of Neuroscience!
Dynamic Range Adaptation to Spectral Stimulus Statistics in Human Auditory Cortex
The paper is now available online free of charge, and—funnily enough—appeared right on January 1, 2014.
The SNAP workshop (Signal and Noise along the Auditory Pathway) is behind us.
It is safe to say that it has been a great success. We will carefully look into the evaluation forms you provided, and we will inform here in due course whether and when a 2nd SNAP (potentially 2015) is in the making.
Let us thank all of you who made SNAP happen. It turned a fun and successful scientific year 2013 into an even greater one. Thank you! We hope to see you soon again, somewhere.
Now, here are some impressions of SNAP 2013:
P.S. Here you find Jonas’ closing summary notes:
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.
Watch this space and the PLOS ONE website for a forthcoming article by Molly Henry and me;
Dissociable neural response signatures for slow amplitude and frequency modulation in human auditory cortex
Harking back at what we had argued initially in our 2012 Frontiers op’ed piece (together with Björn Herrmann), Molly presents neat evidence for dissociable cortical signatures of slow amplitude versus frequency modulation. These cortical signatures potentially provide an efficient means to dissect simultaneously communicated slow temporal and spectral information in acoustic communication signals.
[Update]German public television broadcaster 3sat featured our research on neural oscillations (see our PNAS Paper) in its series nano .
Unfortunately it’s only in German. However, have fun watching it:
Thalamic and parietal brain morphology predicts auditory category learning
Categorizing sounds is vital for adaptive human behavior. Accordingly, changing listening situations (external noise, but also peripheral hearing loss in aging) require listeners to flexibly adjust their categorization strategies, e.g., switch amongst available acoustic cues. However, listeners differ considerably in these adaptive capabilities. For this reason, we employed voxel-based morphometry (VBM) in our study (Neuropsychologia, In press), in order to assess the degree to which individual brain morphology is predictive of such adaptive listening behavior.
Oscillatory Phase Dynamics in Neural Entrainment Underpin Illusory Percepts of Time
Natural sounds like speech and music inherently vary in tempo over time. Yet, contextual factors such as variations in the sound’s loudness or pitch influence perception of temporal rate change towards slowing down or speeding up.
A new MEG study by Björn Herrmann, Molly Henry, Maren Grigutsch and Jonas Obleser asked for the neural oscillatory dynamics that underpin context-induced illusions in temporal rate change and found illusory percepts to be linked to changes in the neural phase patterns of entrained oscillations while the exact frequency of the oscillatory response was related to veridical percepts.
The paper is in press and forthcoming in The Journal of Neuroscience.
Update:
Paper is available online.