Category: Auditory Neuroscience

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
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
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
Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Clinical relevance EEG / MEG

New paper with the Weisz lab in eLife: Aber­rant per­cep­tu­al pre­dic­tions in Tinnitus

Now out in eLife, Lisa Reisinger and Nathan Weisz (Salzburg) with a diverse team includ­ing myself (J.O.) show, using state of the art decod­ing mod­els and a rig­or­ous  approach of inter­nal, pre-reg­is­tered repli­ca­tion, that peo­ple liv­ing with tin­ni­tus (a chron­ic and often very dis­tress­ing audi­to­ry “phan­tom per­cept”) show altered pat­terns of pre­dic­tive audi­to­ry pro­cess­ing. Check it out!

The eLife edi­to­r­i­al assess­ment reads like this: “This impor­tant work presents two stud­ies on pre­dic­tive process­es in sub­jects with and with­out tin­ni­tus. The evi­dence sup­port­ing the authors’ claims is com­pelling, as their sec­ond study serves as an inde­pen­dent repli­ca­tion of the first. Rig­or­ous match­ing between study groups was per­formed, espe­cial­ly in the sec­ond study, increas­ing the prob­a­bil­i­ty that the iden­ti­fied dif­fer­ences in pre­dic­tive pro­cess­ing can tru­ly be attrib­uted to the pres­ence of tin­ni­tus. This work will be of inter­est to researchers, espe­cial­ly neu­ro­sci­en­tists, in the tin­ni­tus field.”

 

Categories
Auditory Neuroscience Editorial Notes Grants Uncategorized

Jonas elect­ed and appoint­ed as DFG review panelist

Jonas Obleser has been elect­ed by the Ger­man sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty as one of the new mem­bers of the so-called “Fachkol­legium” (a select, stand­ing group of review pan­elists) of the Ger­man Research Foun­da­tion (DFG) in the field of sys­temic and cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science.

This is an hon­ourable, non-prof­it addi­tion­al task that pri­mar­i­ly involves sug­gest­ing fund­ings deci­sions for grant pro­pos­als in the field of neu­ro­science. Here’s to four excit­ing if work-intense years.

Categories
Auditory Neuroscience Editorial Notes Events Psychology Uncategorized

Oble­ser­lab retreat Jan­u­ary 2024

A few weeks ago, we had two sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly very intense days where we retreat­ed to Cor­nelius Borck’s love­ly Uni­ver­si­ty out­post in the pit­toresque city cen­ter of Lübeck (thanks for hav­ing us!) and re-vis­it­ed and re-thought out cur­rent and future research agen­da. Thanks to all cur­rent (and future!) lab mem­bers who con­tributed so thought­ful­ly to this. I enjoyed it immense­ly. After a few years with­out prop­er lab retreats and now the pan­dem­ic behind us, we will cer­tain­ly do more of this lat­er in the year.

Categories
Ageing Attention Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Computational Modelling fMRI Job Offers Neural Oscillations Speech perception

We are hir­ing: two new PhD train­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties start­ing ear­ly next year!

© az1172/ Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0]

Our two senior researchers, Sarah Tune and Malte Wöst­mann, are hap­py to each announce the open­ing of a three-year PhD posi­tion in the Obleser lab. The posi­tions are part of two recent­ly fund­ed DFG grants, and will fea­ture real­ly excit­ing com­bi­na­tions of behav­iour mod­el­ling and neur­al dynamics!

Sarah’s project will look into how per­cep­tu­al infer­ence changes with age, using speech per­cep­tion as a mod­el sys­tem. It will bring togeth­er behav­iour­al speech per­cep­tion exper­i­ments and func­tion­al neu­roimag­ing, and apply com­pu­ta­tion­al mod­el­ling to link between the two.

For full details, see the offi­cial job ad.

Malte’s project will focus on audi­to­ry atten­tion and its neur­al bases. It will com­bine behav­iour­al and elec­troen­cephalog­ra­phy (EEG) data in younger and old­er adults to inves­ti­gate the neu­ro-cog­ni­tive mech­a­nisms under­ly­ing cap­ture of atten­tion and sup­pres­sion of distraction.

For full details, see the offi­cial job ad.

The appli­ca­tion dead­line (as sin­gle PDF to the email address named in the ad!) is Nov 19, 2023!

Please don’t hes­i­tate to con­tact Sarah or Malte if you have any infor­mal ques­tions about PhD posi­tions and projects. Sarah will also be at APAN and SfN soon, if you feel like chat­ting with her about the position.

We are look­ing for­ward to many inter­est­ing applications!

 

Categories
Ageing Attention Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Auditory Speech Processing EEG / MEG Executive Functions fMRI Grants Hearing Loss Linguistics Neural dynamics Perception Semantics Uncategorized

A grant dou­ble to celebrate

We are hon­oured and delight­ed that the Deutsche Forschungs­ge­mein­schaft has deemed two of our recent appli­ca­tions wor­thy of fund­ing: The two senior researchers in the  lab, Sarah Tune and Malte Wöst­mann, have both been award­ed three-year grant fund­ing for their new projects. Congratulations!

In her 3‑year, 360‑K€ project “How per­cep­tu­al infer­ence changes with age: Behav­iour­al and brain dynam­ics of speech per­cep­tion”, Sarah Tune will explore the role of per­cep­tu­al pri­ors in speech per­cep­tion in the age­ing lis­ten­er. She will main­ly use neur­al and per­cep­tu­al mod­el­ling and func­tion­al neuroimaging.

In his 3‑year, 270‑K€ project “Inves­ti­ga­tion of cap­ture and sup­pres­sion in audi­to­ry atten­tion”, Malte Wöst­mann will con­tin­ue and refine his suc­cess­ful research endeav­our into dis­so­ci­at­ing the role of sup­pres­sive mech­a­nisms in the lis­ten­ing mind and brain, main­ly using EEG and behav­iour­al modelling.

Both of them will soon adver­tise posts for PhD can­di­dates to join us, accord­ing­ly, and to work on these excit­ing projects with Sarah and Malte and the rest of the Oble­ser­lab team