Categories
Adaptive Control Degraded Acoustics Grants Gyrus Angularis Semantics Speech TMS Uncategorized

New project with Gesa Hartwigsen (Max Planck Leipzig): What is Angu­lar Gyrus actu­al­ly up to?

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!

Categories
Adaptive Control Auditory Neuroscience EEG / MEG Evoked Activity Hearing Loss Neural Phase Perception Preprints (not peer-reviewed yet) Publications Speech Uncategorized

New preprint paper: Fiedler et al. on pre­dict­ing focus of atten­tion from in-ear EEG

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!

In-Ear results Fiedler

Categories
Auditory Speech Processing EEG / MEG Papers Speech

New Review Paper out: Wöst­mann, Fiedler & Obleser in Lan­guage, Cog­ni­tion and Neuroscience

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

Abstract

Mag­ne­to- and elec­troen­cephalo­graph­ic (M/EEG) sig­nals record­ed from the human scalp have allowed for sub­stan­tial advances for neur­al mod­els of speech com­pre­hen­sion over the past decades. These meth­ods are cur­rent­ly advanc­ing rapid­ly and con­tin­ue to offer unpar­al­leled insight in the near-to-real-time neur­al dynam­ics of speech pro­cess­ing. We pro­vide a his­tor­i­cal­ly informed overview over depen­dent mea­sures in the time and fre­quen­cy domain and high­light recent advances result­ing from these mea­sures. We dis­cuss the noto­ri­ous chal­lenges (and solu­tions) speech and lan­guage researchers are faced with when study­ing audi­to­ry brain respons­es in M/EEG. We argue that a key to under­stand­ing the neur­al basis of speech com­pre­hen­sion will lie in study­ing inter­ac­tions between the neur­al track­ing of speech and the func­tion­al neur­al net­work dynam­ics. This arti­cle is intend­ed for both, non-experts who want to learn how to use M/EEG to study speech com­pre­hen­sion and schol­ars aim­ing for an overview of state-of-the-art M/EEG analy­sis methods.

Categories
Uncategorized

Come and find us in San Diego: Neu­ro­science 2016

Next week we will be pre­sent­ing some of our lat­est work at the Neu­ro­science meet­ing in San Diego.

Please tag along and check out our posters.

Also, con­sid­er check­ing in at the APAN satel­lite meet­ing, on Fri­day 11, where most of these posters will be pre­sent­ed as well.

Posters by the Obleser lab:

Sun­day after­noon Session:
ALAVASH et al., Large-scale brain net­works …, Board GG5
FIEDLER et al., Scalp EEG …, Board GG6
LIM et al., Effects of L‑dopa …, Board GG3
WASCHKE et al., Neur­al noise …, Board GG1
WILSCH et al., Inves­ti­gat­ing decay …, Board GG4
Mon­day after­noon Session:
GRAVERSEN et al., Ear-EEG …, Board NNN26

See you there.

Categories
Uncategorized

Wer­den Sie Proband bei uns!

Für unsere Stu­di­en suchen wir inter­essierte Proban­den, die bei uns abwech­slungsre­iche Hörauf­gaben bear­beit­en und uns dadurch helfen, das men­schliche Gehirn bess­er zu ver­ste­hen. Weit­ere Infor­ma­tio­nen find­en Sie hier.

Categories
Events

PhD Stu­dent Lorenz Fiedler join­ing the Black­mar­ket for Use­ful Knowl­edge and Non-Knowl­edge, No. 19 as an expert

Dis­abil­i­ty, tech­no-bod­ies, and the ques­tion of auton­o­my. On Fri­day the 21th Octo­ber, Lorenz is join­ing the 19th “Schwarz­markt des Wis­sens” in Hamburg.

“The Black­mar­ket attempts to bring togeth­er areas, which gen­er­al­ly do not belong togeth­er in pub­lic per­cep­tion: the real­i­ty of phys­i­cal and men­tal dis­abil­i­ty with crit­i­cal visions on the future of the body and soci­ety. Wheel­chair users, bio­hack­ers, cyborgs, post‑, trans- and para-humans and human­ists, sign lan­guage users, physi­cians, pros­thetists, ethi­cists, robot­ic experts and the neu­ro-diver­gent, artists, tech­no­log­i­cal prophets and crit­ics come togeth­er to invent an ethics for con­tem­po­rary bodies.”

Categories
Auditory Cortex Auditory Perception Cross-Modal Integration EEG / MEG Neural Oscillations Perception

New paper out: Plöchl, Gas­ton, Mer­ma­gen, König & Hair­ston, Sci­en­tif­ic Reports

An arti­cle by our new AC group mem­ber Michael Plöchl from his PhD project in Osnabrück has been accept­ed for pub­li­ca­tion in Sci­en­tif­ic Reports. In their study, Plöchl, Gas­ton, Mer­ma­gen, König and Hair­ston demon­strate that “Oscil­la­to­ry activ­i­ty in audi­to­ry cor­tex reflects the per­cep­tu­al lev­el of audio-tac­tile integration”.

oscillatory_activity

Abstract
Cross-modal inter­ac­tions between sen­so­ry chan­nels have been shown to depend on both the spa­tial dis­par­i­ty and the per­cep­tu­al sim­i­lar­i­ty between the pre­sent­ed stim­uli. Here we inves­ti­gate the behav­ioral and neur­al inte­gra­tion of audi­to­ry and tac­tile stim­u­lus pairs at dif­fer­ent lev­els of spa­tial dis­par­i­ty. Addi­tion­al­ly, we mod­u­lat­ed the ampli­tudes of both stim­uli in either a coher­ent or non-coher­ent man­ner. We found that both audi­to­ry and tac­tile local­iza­tion per­for­mance was biased towards the stim­u­lus in the respec­tive oth­er modal­i­ty. This bias lin­ear­ly increas­es with stim­u­lus dis­par­i­ty and is more pro­nounced for coher­ent­ly mod­u­lat­ed stim­u­lus pairs. Analy­ses of elec­troen­cephalo­graph­ic (EEG) activ­i­ty at temporal–cortical sources revealed enhanced event-relat­ed poten­tials (ERPs) as well as decreased alpha and beta pow­er dur­ing bimodal as com­pared to uni­modal stim­u­la­tion. How­ev­er, while the observed ERP dif­fer­ences are sim­i­lar for all stim­u­lus com­bi­na­tions, the extent of oscil­la­to­ry desyn­chro­niza­tion varies with stim­u­lus dis­par­i­ty. More­over, when both stim­uli were sub­jec­tive­ly per­ceived as orig­i­nat­ing from the same direc­tion, the reduc­tion in alpha and beta pow­er was sig­nif­i­cant­ly stronger. These obser­va­tions sug­gest that in the EEG the lev­el of per­cep­tu­al inte­gra­tion is main­ly reflect­ed by changes in ongo­ing oscil­la­to­ry activity.
Categories
Editorial Notes Job Offers Uncategorized

Wir suchen Post­doc-Ver­stärkung. (In Ger­man for once.)

From autumn on, or at the ear­li­est con­ve­nience, we are look­ing for a new post­doc for the (still fair­ly new) Obleser lab in Lübeck. Please see the job advert here. Dead­line for appli­ca­tions is July 6.
From this par­tic­u­lar posthold­er we hope for some sup­port in our Meth­ods teach­ing as well, there­fore a decent com­mand of Ger­man will be required.