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Adaptive Control Ageing EEG / MEG Executive Functions fMRI Job Offers

We’ll be hir­ing soon: Post­docs wanted

The research group “Audi­to­ry Cog­ni­tion” (head­ed by Prof. Dr. Jonas Obleser; auditorycognition.com) in the recent­ly estab­lished Depart­ment of Psy­chol­o­gy, Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck, is seek­ing to hire several

Post­doc­tor­al Researchers

start­ing by Jan­u­ary 2016, ini­tial­ly for 3 years, with the option of a 2‑year exten­sion. These posi­tions will fall into the larg­er frame­work of an ERC Con­sol­ida­tor grant “The lis­ten­ing chal­lenge: How age­ing brains adapt” recent­ly award­ed to Jonas Obleser, and will allow the joint devel­op­ment of cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science and psy­cho­log­i­cal research projects tar­get­ing adap­tive con­trol in the audi­to­ry modal­i­ty of mid­dle-aged adults.

[About the ERC project: The audi­to­ry sen­so­ry modal­i­ty pos­es an excel­lent, although under-utilised, research mod­el to under­stand the cog­ni­tive adjust­ments to sen­so­ry change (here termed “adap­tive con­trol”), their neur­al basis, and their large vari­a­tion amongst indi­vid­u­als. Hear­ing abil­i­ties begin to decline already in the fourth life decade, and our guid­ing hypoth­e­sis is that indi­vid­u­als dif­fer in the extent to which they are neu­ral­ly, cog­ni­tive­ly, and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly equipped to adapt to this sen­so­ry decline.]

We are look­ing for cre­ative minds with a PhD degree and a promis­ing track record in cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science, psy­chol­o­gy, physics, or engi­neer­ing. A strong back­ground and inter­est in research meth­ods is desir­able. Pri­or expe­ri­ence with either human neu­ro­science meth­ods (espe­cial­ly advanced EEG and/or fMRI analy­ses) or mod­el­ing of rich data sets (e.g., latent growth mod­el­ing, struc­tur­al equa­tion mod­el­ing) is expected.

The Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck is a mod­ern uni­ver­si­ty spe­cial­iz­ing in Med­i­cine, Com­put­er Sci­ence, Mol­e­c­u­lar Biol­o­gy, Bio­math­e­mat­ics and Med­ical Engi­neer­ing. Inter­na­tion­al­ly renowned research and high stan­dards of aca­d­e­m­ic tutor­ing char­ac­ter­ize the pro­file of the uni­ver­si­ty. A new ded­i­cat­ed research build­ing (Cen­tre for Brain, Behav­iour, and Metab­o­lism; CBBM) hous­ing also the Obleser lab will open in late 2015.

Pay­ment will fol­low salary group E13 TV‑L (full time), if con­di­tions based on Ger­man Pub­lic ser­vice reg­u­la­tions are satisfied.

 

These posi­tions will be announced offi­cial­ly lat­er in autumn 2015, but inter­est­ed can­di­dates should be in touch now with Jonas Obleser, jonas.obleser@uni-luebeck.de

Categories
Ageing Auditory Speech Processing Degraded Acoustics Hearing Loss Media Publications Speech

Quick inter­view for detektor.fm

Based on Malte’s recent J Neu­rosci study, Jonas did a brief inter­view for Ger­man radio detektor.fm today and talked lis­ten­ing effort, dig­i­tal phone lines, noise reduc­tion, and next-gen­er­a­tion hear­ing aids with host Tere­sa Nehm. (In Ger­man only.)

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Auditory Speech Processing EEG / MEG Linguistics Papers Publications Speech

New edi­to­r­i­al in “Brain & Lan­guage”: Re-vis­it­ing the elec­tro­phys­i­ol­o­gy of language

I had the hon­our of guest-edit­ing a spe­cial issue for the clas­sic jour­nal “Brain and Lan­guage” and have thus con­tributed a brief edi­to­r­i­al (now online) to this issue. The spe­cial issue re-vis­its old themes and new leads in the elec­tro­phys­i­ol­o­gy of speech, lan­guage, and its precursors.

UPDATE: The full spe­cial issue appeared in Sep­tem­ber 2015 and all arti­cles are now acces­si­ble and citable. Thanks for your kind attention!

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Editorial Notes Job Offers

New job post

Please spread the word:

We are offer­ing a PhD post (alter­na­tive­ly, a half-time Post­doc­tor­al post) in our new Audi­to­ry Cog­ni­tion Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck branch! (Eng­lish ver­sion here.)

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Ageing Auditory Cortex Editorial Notes Events Grants

ERC Con­sol­ida­tor Grant award­ed to Jonas Obleser

It is with great plea­sure that we can report on a new major grant for the Audi­to­ry Cog­ni­tion group / Obleser lab: In the 2014 call by the Euro­pean Research Coun­cil (ERC), Jonas Obleser has very recent­ly been award­ed an ERC Con­sol­ida­tor grant (for researchers 7–12 years post their PhD), worth 1.97 mil­lion €. The grant has been award­ed to fund a project enti­tled “The lis­ten­ing chal­lenge: How age­ing brains adapt”. The project will last for five years.

Read the offi­cial ERC press release here.

 

NEW-Logo-ERC-OUTLINEadapt-logo-2

Categories
EEG / MEG Neural Oscillations Neural Phase Papers Publications

Strauß again — in Jour­nal of Neuroscience

Alum­na Dr. Antje Strauß just got anoth­er paper on:

Alpha Phase Deter­mines Suc­cess­ful Lex­i­cal Deci­sion in Noise

by Antje Strauß, Mol­ly Hen­ry, Math­ias Scharinger, and Jonas Obleser

appeared in Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science. Check the abstract below;

Abstract
Psy­chophys­i­cal tar­get detec­tion has been shown to be mod­u­lat­ed by slow oscil­la­to­ry brain phase. How­ev­er, thus far, only low-lev­el sen­so­ry stim­uli have been used as tar­gets. The cur­rent human elec­troen­cephalog­ra­phy (EEG) study exam­ined the influ­ence of neur­al oscil­la­to­ry phase on a lex­i­cal-deci­sion task per­formed for stim­uli embed­ded in noise. Neur­al phase angles were com­pared for cor­rect ver­sus incor­rect lex­i­cal deci­sions using a phase bifur­ca­tion index (BI), which quan­ti­fies dif­fer­ences in mean phase angles and phase con­cen­tra­tions between cor­rect and incor­rect tri­als. Neur­al phase angles in the alpha fre­quen­cy range (8–12 Hz) over right ante­ri­or sen­sors were approx­i­mate­ly antiphase in a pres­tim­u­lus time win­dow, and thus suc­cess­ful­ly dis­tin­guished between cor­rect and incor­rect lex­i­cal deci­sions. More­over, alpha-band oscil­la­tions were again approx­i­mate­ly antiphase across par­tic­i­pants for cor­rect ver­sus incor­rect tri­als dur­ing a lat­er peri­s­tim­u­lus time win­dow (∼500 ms) at left-cen­tral elec­trodes. Strik­ing­ly, lex­i­cal deci­sion accu­ra­cy was not pre­dict­ed by either event-relat­ed poten­tials (ERPs) or oscil­la­to­ry pow­er mea­sures. We sug­gest that cor­rect lex­i­cal deci­sions depend both on suc­cess­ful sen­so­ry pro­cess­ing, which is made pos­si­ble by the align­ment of stim­u­lus onset with an opti­mal alpha phase, as well as inte­gra­tion and weight­ing of deci­sion­al infor­ma­tion, which is cou­pled to alpha phase imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing the crit­i­cal manip­u­la­tion that dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed words from pseu­do­words. The cur­rent study con­sti­tutes a first step toward char­ac­ter­iz­ing the role of dynam­ic oscil­la­to­ry brain states for high­er cog­ni­tive func­tions, such as spo­ken word recognition.
Categories
EEG / MEG Neural Oscillations Neural Phase Papers Publications

New Paper out in Psy­chophys­i­ol­o­gy — Wilsch et al.

A new paper on

Slow-delta phase con­cen­tra­tion marks improved tem­po­ral expec­ta­tions based on the pas­sage of time

by AC PhD Anna Wilsch, alum­ni post­docs Mol­ly Hen­ry & Björn Her­rmann, AC head Jonas Obleser along with Burkhard Maess appeared in Psychophysiology.

Check the online source, or take a quick look on the abstract below.

Abstract
Tem­po­ral expec­ta­tions enhance neur­al encod­ing pre­ci­sion, reflect­ed in opti­mized align­ment of slow neur­al oscil­la­to­ry phase, and facil­i­tate sub­se­quent stim­u­lus pro­cess­ing. If an even­t’s exact occur­rence time is unknown, tem­po­ral expec­ta­tions arise sole­ly from the pas­sage of time. Here, we show that this spe­cif­ic type of tem­po­ral expec­ta­tion is also reflect­ed in neur­al phase orga­ni­za­tion. While under­go­ing mag­ne­toen­cephalog­ra­phy, par­tic­i­pants per­formed an audi­to­ry-delayed match­ing-to-sam­ple task with two syl­la­bles (S1, S2). Crit­i­cal­ly, S1-onset time var­ied in the 0.6–1.8‑s (i.e., 0.6−1.7 Hz) range. Increas­ing S1-onset times led to increased slow-delta (0.6−0.9 Hz) phase coher­ence over right fron­totem­po­ral sen­sors dur­ing S1 encod­ing. More­over, indi­vid­u­als with high­er slow-delta coher­ence showed decreased alpha pow­er (8−13 Hz) dur­ing sub­se­quent mem­o­ry reten­tion. In sum, tem­po­ral expec­ta­tions based on the pas­sage of time opti­mize the pre­cise align­ment of neur­al oscil­la­to­ry phase with an expect­ed stimulus.

Ref­er­ences

  • Wilsch A1, Hen­ry MJ, Her­rmann B, Maess B, Obleser J. Slow-delta phase con­cen­tra­tion marks improved tem­po­ral expec­ta­tions based on the pas­sage of time. Psy­chophys­i­ol­o­gy. 2015 Feb 16. PMID: 25684032. [Open with Read]
Categories
Editorial Notes

2015 — Embrac­ing Change in the Obleser Lab

Time flies: The Audi­to­ry Cog­ni­tion group aka The Obleser Lab has just entered its fifth year. We took off prop­er­ly in ear­ly 2011, so this is a good point in time to briefly recap. We have had four excit­ing and very pro­duc­tive years so far, and this fifth year is bring­ing a lot of excit­ing turn-over as well. First, new faces have joined our group:

Dr. Sophie Herb­st a psy­chol­o­gist with keen inter­ests in time per­cep­tion joined us as a post­doc, com­ing from Niko Busch’s lab at the Char­ité Berlin.

Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Lorenz Fiedler joined us to help us build real-time links between EEG and hear­ing aids, as planned in our Volk­swa­gen project.

Sec­ond, a few great tal­ents have moved on with the begin­ning of 2015:

Antje Strauß just received her Dr. rer. nat. (PhD) from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Leipzig and is now at the GIPSA lab, Uni­ver­si­ty of Greno­ble, France.

Dr. Mol­ly Hen­ry and Dr. Björn Her­rmann have both tak­en up new Post­doc­tor­al jobs at the Uni­ver­si­ty of West­ern Ontario, Lon­don, Ontario, CA. They will be work­ing with Jes­si­ca Grahn and Ingrid John­srude, respec­tive­ly.

Dr. Alex Brand­mey­er could not resist a fan­tas­tic offer by Dol­by Sys­tems Inc., San Fran­cis­co to join them as a research scientist.

Ear­li­er in autumn 2014 already, Julia Erb had tak­en up a post­doc posi­tion with Elia Formisano at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Maas­tricht.

… the best of luck and many thanks to all the new AC alumni!

Last­ly, Jonas as head of the group has just been appoint­ed Pro­fes­sor for Research Meth­ods and Sta­tis­tics at the (new­ly-found­ed) Depart­ment of Psy­chol­o­gy, Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck, Ger­many.

These great news also imply that the Audi­to­ry Cog­ni­tion group as a whole will, as con­ceived by the Max Planck Soci­ety when pro­vid­ing this five-year start-up fund­ing, slow­ly trans­plant to a new place, name­ly: Lübeck, over the year to come. Watch this space! Yet, the labels “auditorycognition.com” and “obleserlab.com” will sure­ly remain active and move with us.