Erb J, Obleser J. Upregulation of cognitive control networks in older adults’ speech comprehension. Front Syst Neurosci. 2013 Dec 24;7:116. PMID: 24399939. [Open with Read]
Speech comprehension abilities decline with age and with age-related hearing loss, but it is unclear how this decline expresses in terms of central neural mechanisms. The current study examined neural […]
Watch this space and the PLOSONE 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.
Henry MJ, Obleser J. Dissociable neural response signatures for slow amplitude and frequency modulation in human auditory cortex. PLoS One. 2013 Oct 29;8(10):e78758. PMID: 24205309. [Open with Read]
Natural auditory stimuli are characterized by slow fluctuations in amplitude and frequency. However, the degree to which the neural responses to slow amplitude modulation (AM) and frequency modulation […]
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.
Herrmann B, Henry MJ, Grigutsch M, Obleser J. Oscillatory phase dynamics in neural entrainment underpin illusory percepts of time. J Neurosci. 2013 Oct 2;33(40):15799–809. PMID: 24089487. [Open with Read]
Neural oscillatory dynamics are a candidate mechanism to steer perception of time and temporal rate change. While oscillator models of time perception are strongly supported by behavioral evidence, a […]
When we listen to sounds like speech and music, we have to make sense of different acoustic features that vary simultaneously along multiple time scales. This means that we, as listeners, have to selectively attend to, but at the same time selectively ignore, separate but intertwined features of a stimulus.
Brain regions associated with selective attending to and selective ignoring of temporal stimulus features. (more)
A newly published fMRI study by Molly Henry, Björn Herrmann, and Jonas Obleser found a network of brain regions that responded oppositely to identical stimulus characteristics depending on whether they were relevant or irrelevant, even when both stimulus features involved attention to time and temporal features.
Henry MJ, Herrmann B, Obleser J. Selective Attention to Temporal Features on Nested Time Scales. Cereb Cortex. 2013 Aug 26. PMID: 23978652. [Open with Read]
Meaningful auditory stimuli such as speech and music often vary simultaneously along multiple time scales. Thus, listeners must selectively attend to, and selectively ignore, separate but intertwined […]
Auditory filter width affects response magnitude but not frequency specificity in auditory cortex
This is fantastic news on a friday morning: Obleser lab Postdoc Björn Herrmann teamed up with his fellow Postdocs Mathias Scharinger and Molly Henry to study how spectral analysis in the auditory periphery (termed frequency selectivity) relates to processing in auditory cortex (termed frequency specificity; see also Björns paper in J Neurophysiol 2013).
Giving this an ageing and hearing loss perspective and building on the concept of auditory filters in the cochlea (Moore et al.), Björn found that the overall N1 amplitude of listeners, but not their frequency-specific neural adaptation patterns, is correlated with the pass-band of the auditory filter.
This suggests that widened auditory filters are compensated for by a response gain in frequency-specific areas of auditory cortex; the paper is in press and forthcoming in Hearing Research.
Herrmann B, Henry MJ, Scharinger M, Obleser J. Auditory filter width affects response magnitude but not frequency specificity in auditory cortex. Hear Res. 2013 Oct;304:128–36. PMID: 23876524. [Open with Read]
Spectral analysis of acoustic stimuli occurs in the auditory periphery (termed frequency selectivity) as well as at the level of auditory cortex (termed frequency specificity). Frequency selectivity i […]
Listeners show a remarkable ability to quickly adjust to degraded speech input. Here, we aimed to identify the neural mechanisms of such short-term perceptual adaptation. In a sparse-sampling, cardiac-gated functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) acquisition, human listeners heard and repeated back 4‑band-vocoded sentences
Erb J, Henry MJ, Eisner F, Obleser J. The brain dynamics of rapid perceptual adaptation to adverse listening conditions. J Neurosci. 2013 Jun 26;33(26):10688–97. PMID: 23804092. [Open with Read]
Listeners show a remarkable ability to quickly adjust to degraded speech input. Here, we aimed to identify the neural mechanisms of such short-term perceptual adaptation. In a sparse-sampling, cardiac […]
Frequency-specific adaptation in human auditory cortex depends on the spectral variance in the acoustic stimulation
we show that adaptation of neural responses in human auditory cortex to acoustic stimulation is not fixed. Instead, the degree of co-adaptation in these tonotopically organized brain regions varies (widens/tightens) with the spectral properties of the acoustic stimulation. We relate this to sensory memory processes and short-term plasticity which allows for the neural system to adjust to the acoustic properties in the environment.
References
Herrmann B, Henry MJ, Obleser J. Frequency-specific adaptation in human auditory cortex depends on the spectral variance in the acoustic stimulation. J Neurophysiol. 2013 Apr;109(8):2086–96. PMID: 23343904. [Open with Read]
In auditory cortex, activation and subsequent adaptation is strongest for regions responding best to a stimulated tone frequency and less for regions responding best to other frequencies. Previous att […]
