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Category: Papers

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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!

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Ageing Clinical relevance Papers Psychiatry Publications Uncategorized

New papers in autumn 2023:

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

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.

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Memory Papers Publications Sleep

New Paper in PNAS by Ngo et al. enti­tled “Shap­ing overnight con­sol­i­da­tion via slow-oscil­la­tion closed-loop tar­get­ed mem­o­ry reactivation”

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.

 

 

Categories
Attention Memory Papers

New Paper in Sci­en­tif­ic Reports by Lui&Wöstmann

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.

Categories
Attention fMRI Memory Papers

New paper in Neu­roIm­age, Lim et al.

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.

Categories
Brain stimulation Memory Papers Psychiatry Publications Sleep

New Paper in Jour­nal of Sleep Research by Wein­hold et al.

In a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Sara Lena Wein­hold and Robert Göder at the Chris­t­ian-Albrechts-Uni­ver­si­ty Kiel, Hong-Viet V. Ngo recent­ly pub­lished a study inves­ti­gat­ing the influ­ence of audi­to­ry stim­u­la­tion dur­ing sleep on mem­o­ry con­sol­i­da­tion in peo­ple with schizophrenia.

The study shows that audi­to­ry stim­u­la­tion tar­get­ing slow oscil­la­tions – a key rhythm medi­at­ing mem­o­ry pro­cess­ing – in real-time in peo­ple with schiz­o­phre­nia results in an elec­tro­phys­i­o­log­i­cal response that is sim­i­lar to that in healthy par­tic­i­pants. Albeit an absent effect of stim­u­la­tion on mem­o­ry con­sol­i­da­tion, the authors found the stronger the slow oscil­la­tion enhance­ment the less par­tic­i­pants for­got, i.e., the bet­ter mem­o­ry per­for­mance was, the fol­low­ing morning.

Thus, this paper not only con­firms the over­all fea­si­bil­i­ty of this approach and pro­vides essen­tial elec­tro­phys­i­o­log­i­cal insights. It fur­ther­more high­lights the poten­tial of audi­to­ry stim­u­la­tion to pro­vide alter­na­tive treat­ments for sleep-relat­ed dys­func­tions in patients with schiz­o­phre­nia. The arti­cle 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.