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Attention Auditory Neuroscience Neural Oscillations Papers Psychology Uncategorized

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 an Elec­troen­cephalog­ra­phy (EEG) study to direct­ly con­trast these two processes.

Par­tic­i­pants per­formed a pitch dis­crim­i­na­tion task on a tone sequence pre­sent­ed at one loud­speak­er loca­tion while a dis­tract­ing tone sequence was pre­sent­ed at anoth­er loca­tion. When the dis­trac­tor was fixed in the front, atten­tion to upcom­ing tar­gets on the left ver­sus right side induced hemi­spher­ic lat­er­al­i­sa­tion of alpha pow­er with rel­a­tive­ly high­er pow­er ipsi- ver­sus con­tralat­er­al to the side of attention.

Crit­i­cal­ly, when the tar­get was fixed in front, sup­pres­sion of upcom­ing dis­trac­tors reversed the pat­tern of alpha lat­er­al­i­sa­tion, that is, alpha pow­er increased con­tralat­er­al to the dis­trac­tor and decreased ipsi­lat­er­al­ly. Since the two lat­er­al­ized alpha respons­es were uncor­re­lat­ed across par­tic­i­pants, they can be con­sid­ered large­ly inde­pen­dent cog­ni­tive mechanisms.

This was fur­ther sup­port­ed by the fact that alpha lat­er­al­i­sa­tion in response to dis­trac­tor sup­pres­sion orig­i­nat­ed in more ante­ri­or, frontal cor­ti­cal regions com­pared with tar­get selec­tion (see figure).

The paper is also avail­able as preprint here.

 

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New lab mem­ber Sebas­t­ian Puschmann

We wel­come Dr. Sebas­t­ian Puschmann as a new post­doc in the Obleser/Auditory Cog­ni­tion lab!

Sebas­t­ian has a back­ground in Physics. He received his train­ing in audi­to­ry cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Old­en­burg and the Mon­tre­al Neu­ro­log­i­cal Insti­tute. In Lübeck, Sebas­t­ian will push for­ward stud­ies on the neur­al mechan­ics and neur­al changes in hear­ing loss.

 

 

 

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Adaptive Control Attention fMRI Grants Hearing Loss Uncategorized

New DFG project led by Mohsen Alavash on the Net­work Neu­ro­science of Spa­tial Attention

Con­grat­u­la­tions to our cur­rent­ly ERC-fund­ed lab mem­ber and post­doc Mohsen Alavash who has just secured 3‑year fund­ing (~380,000 €) by the Deutsche Forschungs­ge­mein­schaft (DFG) for an ambi­tious project: Mohsen wants to get clos­er to a net­work/­graph-the­o­ret­i­cal descrip­tion of how spa­tial atten­tion in the lis­ten­ing brain is organ­ised. In a lat­er stage of the project, Mohsen also plans on study­ing how the net­work organ­i­sa­tion of spa­tial atten­tion may be altered in hear­ing-impaired listeners.

We are glad that Mohsen plans on run­ning this project with­in the Obleser lab, here at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck.

Also, make sure to check out Mohsen’s lat­est pub­li­ca­tion on the topic.

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Editorial Notes Job Offers Uncategorized

Anoth­er chance for a fund­ed post­doc with us:

Dead­line March 15, 2019!


(Here is the job ad in Eng­lish.)
Any infor­mal inquiries: Please call or email Jonas.

***

Should you be inter­est­ed in work­ing with us more generally/supported by oth­er funds/at a lat­er stage, please be in touch as well.

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Events Media Uncategorized

Jonas appoint­ed review­ing edi­tor for The Jour­nal of Neuroscience

After three very inter­est­ing and instruc­tive years as a han­dling edi­tor for Neu­roim­age, I have just accept­ed an invi­ta­tion to join my favourite jour­nal, the clas­sic Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science, as what they call “Review­ing edi­tor” (i.e., han­dling or action edi­tor). Look­ing for­ward to some excit­ing sci­ence on our desks there!

The sci­en­tif­ic pub­lish­ing field is chang­ing fast, and I am par­tic­u­lar­ly hap­py for the oppor­tu­ni­ty to help fos­ter a suc­cess­ful, soci­ety-run jour­nal like The Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science in the three upcom­ing years.

— Jonas

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Adaptive Control Ageing Attention Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Speech Processing Executive Functions fMRI Papers Psychology Uncategorized

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 PNAS! (Also, our uni is cur­rent­ly fea­tur­ing a Ger­man-lan­guage press release on it, as well as an Eng­lish-lan­guage ver­sion)

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Adaptive Control Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Working Memory Neural Oscillations Papers Perception Psychology Uncategorized

New paper in The Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science: Wilsch et al.., Tem­po­ral expec­ta­tion mod­u­lates the cor­ti­cal dynam­ics of short-term memory

Con­grat­u­la­tions to Oble­ser­lab alum­na Anna Wilsch, who is – for now – leav­ing acad­e­mia on a true high with her lat­est offer­ing on how tem­po­ral expec­ta­tions (“fore­knowl­edge” about when some­thing is to hap­pen) shape the neur­al make-up of memory!

Record­ed while the Oble­ser­lab was still in Leipzig at the Max Planck, and analysed with great input from our co-authors Mol­ly Hen­ry, Björn Her­rmann as well as Christoph Her­rmann (Old­en­burg), Anna used Mag­ne­toen­cephalog­ra­phy in an intri­cate but ulti­mate­ly very sim­ple sen­so­ry-mem­o­ry paradigm.

 

While sen­so­ry mem­o­ries of the phys­i­cal world fade quick­ly, Anna here shows that this decay of short-term mem­o­ry can be coun­ter­act­ed by tem­po­ral expectation.

Notably, spa­tial­ly dis­trib­uted cor­ti­cal pat­terns of alpha (8−−13 Hz) pow­er showed oppos­ing effects in audi­to­ry vs. visu­al sen­so­ry cor­tices. More­over, alpha-tuned con­nec­tiv­i­ty changes with­in supramodal atten­tion net­works reflect the allo­ca­tion of neur­al resources as short-term mem­o­ry rep­re­sen­ta­tions fade.

— to be updat­ed as the paper will become avail­able online –

Categories
Adaptive Control Attention Auditory Working Memory Clinical relevance Executive Functions fMRI Papers Psychology Publications Uncategorized

New paper in press in ‘Neu­roim­age’: Alavash, Lim, et al

Oble­ser­lab post­doc Mohsen Alavash and Oble­ser­lab Alum­na Sung-Joo Lim are in press at Neu­roim­age!

They argue with data from a place­bo-con­trolled dopamin­er­gic inter­ven­tion study that BOLD sig­nal vari­abil­i­ty and the func­tion­al con­nec­tome are sur­pris­ing­ly clear­ly affect­ed by L‑Dopa, and (ii) that the degree of change in these met­rics can explain the degree to which indi­vid­u­als will prof­it from L‑DOPA in per­form­ing the chal­leng­ing lis­ten­ing task (while oth­ers dont; Preprint here ).

Alavash, M., Lim, S.J., Thiel, C., Sehm, B., Deser­no, L., & Obleser, J. (2018) Dopamin­er­gic mod­u­la­tion of hemo­dy­nam­ic sig­nal vari­abil­i­ty and the func­tion­al con­nec­tome dur­ing cog­ni­tive per­for­mance. Neu­roim­age. In press.

— Thanks also and in par­tic­u­lar to our col­leagues Chris­tiane Thiel of Old­en­burg, and Bern­hard Sehm and Lorenz Deser­no of Leipzig, who helped us made this large-scale L‑DOPA project happen!