Category: Papers

• 3 July 2020

  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 […]

• 9 January 2020

  New paper in press in elife: Waschke et al.

  Oble­ser­lab senior PhD stu­dent Leo Waschke, along­side co-authors Sarah Tune and Jonas Obleser, has a new paper in eLife. The pro­cess­ing of sen­so­ry infor­ma­tion from our envi­ron­ment is not con­stant but rather varies with changes in ongo­ing brain activ­i­ty, or brain states. Thus, also the acu­ity of per­cep­tu­al deci­sions depends on the brain state dur­ing […]

• 9 November 2019

  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 […]

• 20 March 2019

  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 […]

• 2 January 2019

  New paper in PNAS by Alavash, Tune, Obleser

  How brain areas com­mu­ni­cate shapes human com­mu­ni­ca­tion: The hear­ing regions in your brain form new alliances as you try to lis­ten at the cock­tail party Oble­ser­lab Post­docs Mohsen Alavash and Sarah Tune rock out an intri­cate graph-the­o­ret­i­cal account of mod­u­lar recon­fig­u­ra­tions in chal­leng­ing lis­ten­ing sit­u­a­tions, and how these pre­dict indi­vid­u­als’ lis­ten­ing success. Avail­able online now in […]

• 21 November 2018

  New paper by Erb et al. in Cere­bral Cor­tex: Human but not mon­key audi­to­ry cor­tex is tuned to slow tem­po­ral rates

  In a new com­par­a­tive fMRI study just pub­lished in Cere­bral Cor­tex, AC post­doc Julia Erb and her col­lab­o­ra­tors in the Formisano (Maas­tricht Uni­ver­si­ty) and Van­duf­fel labs (KU Leu­ven) pro­vide us with nov­el insights into speech evo­lu­tion. These data by Erb et al. reveal homolo­gies and dif­fer­ences in nat­ur­al sound-encod­ing in human and non-human pri­mate cortex. From […]

• 14 November 2018

  New paper in Neu­roim­age by Fiedler et al.: Track­ing ignored speech matters

  Lis­ten­ing requires selec­tive neur­al pro­cess­ing of the incom­ing sound mix­ture, which in humans is borne out by a sur­pris­ing­ly clean rep­re­sen­ta­tion of attend­ed-only speech in audi­to­ry cor­tex. How this neur­al selec­tiv­i­ty is achieved even at neg­a­tive sig­nal-to-noise ratios (SNR) remains unclear. We show that, under such con­di­tions, a late cor­ti­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion (i.e., neur­al track­ing) of the ignored acoustic sig­nal […]

• 29 October 2018

  New paper in press in the Euro­pean Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science: Wöst­mann et al demon­strate that the pow­er of pres­tim­u­lus alpha oscil­la­tions direct­ly relates to con­fi­dence in pitch-discrimination

  What is the mech­a­nis­tic rel­e­vance of neur­al alpha oscil­la­tions (~10 Hz) for per­cep­tion? To answer this ques­tion, we analysed EEG data from a task that required par­tic­i­pants to com­pare the pitch of two tones that were, unbe­knownst to par­tic­i­pants, iden­ti­cal. Impor­tant­ly, this task entire­ly removed poten­tial con­founds of vary­ing evi­dence in the stim­u­lus or vary­ing accu­ra­cy. […]

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