Come and join us and an already superbe line-up of confirmed speakers in December in Lübeck.
PhD student Leonhard Waschke goes live (pre-peer-review) with his work on the states and traits of neural noise.
Here is the preprint of the paper, which now will undergo peer-review. Thanks for checking it out!
Story time: Some time in early 2011, I sat down with an American, fresh PhD graduate who had just joined my new lab, in a Leipzig bar (Café Cantona; if you are interested you can find this great 24⁄7 bar with exquisite food also in the acknowledgments of, e.g., Obleser & Eisner, Trends Cogn Sci, 2009).
To the day, I could still point you to the table she and I sat down at, and the wall I faced (which is notable because we actually spent an unhealthy amount of time and money there over the years). Soon thereafter, we grabbed a beer mat and started scribbling waves and marked where we would place so-called targets (psychologist lingo) and talked a lot of gibberish about frequency modulation. I remember vididly that I had just read an insanely long review paper on neural oscillations by Wolfgang Klimesch (that, more in passing, cited old-school tales of Schmitt filters by the late great Francesco Varela or pioneers sounding like record producers, Dustman & Beck, 1965), while the young American opposite me turned out to be an—if adventurous—die-hard expert on auditory psychophysics.
Who would have thought that this very night would carry me towards tenure in three years’ time, and her around the globe as an esteemed young colleague.
When I nowadays check Google scholar, I am amazed to see that already more than 100 other papers have cited what directly grew out of that beer mat one and a half years later—not counting the many more papers this said postdoc, Molly Henry, has produced since.
Here is the link to how excited we were when the paper appeared in PNAS in 2012, and a link to the little movie a german science program kindly produced on all of this in 2013.
Wow: Massive congratulations to Lea Schmitt, who just has been awarded the Colin Cherry Award 2017 at the 9th Speech in Noise (SPIN) workshop in Oldenburg. Germany. The Colin Cherry award honours the best poster (audience award) and gets you a cocktail shaker set.
Lea’s work, which formed her MSc thesis, is both provocative and imaginative: Lea went after the ancient truism that closing your eyes helps you in difficult listening situations. Turns out it’s not that simple, but Lea established a very neat link to individual differences in alpha-power dynamics. Watch this space for a new paper to come (Schmitt, Obleser, & Wöstmann, forthcoming).
Lea is not only the first student to receive her MSc in the new Obleser lab in Lübeck, but (maybe not so) incidentally, she was mainly supervised by a former Colin Cherry Award winner himself, Obleserlab’s own Malte Wöstmann. Congratulations to both!
After great success in the past, we are proud to announce a new SNAP Workshop in 2017. It will take place at the University of Lübeck in December 2017 — save the date!
SNAP will gather 12–14 speakers and about 50 or so participants for comparably extensive talks and discussions in a two-day event, to be held amongst the pittoresque surroundings of UNESCO world heritage city Lübeck (near Hamburg). A poster session will be arranged. All details to follow.
Santa struck early this year: The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) has just granted AC head Jonas (University of Lübeck) and brain-stimulation wiz Gesa Hartwigsen (now a group leader at AC’s former institution, the MPI in Leipzig) a joint 3‑year grant, worth 371,000 € in total, on “Modulating neural network dynamics of speech comprehension: The role of the angular gyrus”. This project will build on Gesa and Jonas’ recent paper in Cortex on the topic. Thanks again to the funding body and the helpful reviewers!
Very proud: PhD student Lorenz Fiedler goes live (pre-peer-review) with his work of predicting the focus of attention in single-channel/forward models in in-ear EEG!
Here is the preprint of the paper, which now will undergo peer-review. Thanks for checking it out!
A review article for those interested in how to use magneto-/electroencephalography (M/EEG) to study speech comprehension. We provide a historically informed overview over dependent measures in the time and frequency domain, highlight recent advances resulting from these measures and review the notorious challenges and solutions speech and language researchers are faced with when studying electrophysiological brain responses.
Now available online:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23273798.2016.1262051