Categories
Editorial Notes Job Offers

Post­doc­tor­al researcher wanted!

The Max Planck Insti­tute for Human Cog­ni­tive and Brain Sci­ences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig and the Max Planck Research Group “Audi­to­ry Cog­ni­tion” (head­ed by Jonas Obleser) are now offer­ing a Post­doc­tor­al researcher posi­tion, for ini­tial­ly 2 years, prefer­ably start­ing by Octo­ber 2013.

Suc­cess­ful can­di­dates will have a PhD in cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science, psy­chol­o­gy, or nat­ur­al sci­ences. Pri­or expe­ri­ence with either fMRI or EEG/MEG meth­ods is expect­ed, and an inter­est in fur­ther apply­ing and com­bin­ing both domains in their research is high­ly desir­able. Can­di­dates with a back­ground and/or inter­est in advanced fMRI meth­ods are par­tic­u­lar­ly encour­aged to apply. 

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Post­doc­tor­al researcher wanted!”
Categories
Neural Oscillations

Spek­trum on neur­al oscil­la­tions (Hen­ry & Obleser)

Ger­man sci­ence mag­a­zine Spek­trum pub­lished an arti­cle on our recent paper (see our post):

Fre­quen­cy mod­u­la­tion entrains slow neur­al oscil­la­tions and opti­mizes human lis­ten­ing behavior

issued in PNAS here.

Illus­trat­ed with our nice group pho­to you can read the arti­cle: Mit Rhyth­mus geht auch Hören bess­er by Annegret Faber online.

Ref­er­ences

  • Hen­ry MJ, Obleser J. Fre­quen­cy mod­u­la­tion entrains slow neur­al oscil­la­tions and opti­mizes human lis­ten­ing behav­ior. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Dec 4;109(49):20095–100. PMID: 23151506. [Open with Read]
Categories
Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience EEG / MEG Papers Publications

New paper out: Her­rmann, Hen­ry, and Obleser in Jour­nal of Neurophysiology

In this study (avail­able online)

Fre­quen­cy-spe­cif­ic adap­ta­tion in human audi­to­ry cor­tex depends on the spec­tral vari­ance in the acoustic stimulation

we show that adap­ta­tion of neur­al respons­es in human audi­to­ry cor­tex to acoustic stim­u­la­tion is not fixed. Instead, the degree of co-adap­ta­tion in these tono­topi­cal­ly orga­nized brain regions varies (widens/tightens) with the spec­tral prop­er­ties of the acoustic stim­u­la­tion. We relate this to sen­so­ry mem­o­ry process­es and short-term plas­tic­i­ty which allows for the neur­al sys­tem to adjust to the acoustic prop­er­ties in the environment.

Ref­er­ences

  • Her­rmann B, Hen­ry MJ, Obleser J. Fre­quen­cy-spe­cif­ic adap­ta­tion in human audi­to­ry cor­tex depends on the spec­tral vari­ance in the acoustic stim­u­la­tion. J Neu­ro­phys­i­ol. 2013 Apr;109(8):2086–96. PMID: 23343904. [Open with Read]
Categories
Papers Perception Publications

New Paper in press — Scharinger, Hen­ry, Obleser, in Mem­o­ry & Cognition

For nor­mal-hear­ing humans, cat­e­go­riz­ing com­plex acoustic stim­uli is a seem­ing­ly effort­less process, even if one has nev­er heard the par­tic­u­lar sounds before. Nev­er­the­less, pri­or expe­ri­ence with spe­cif­ic cor­re­la­tions between acoustic stim­u­lus prop­er­ties affects the cat­e­go­riza­tion in a ben­e­fi­cial way, as we show in our paper:

Pri­or expe­ri­ence with neg­a­tive spec­tral cor­re­la­tions pro­motes infor­ma­tion inte­gra­tion dur­ing audi­to­ry cat­e­go­ry learning

(by Math­ias Scharinger, Mol­ly Hen­ry, and Jonas Obleser).

The arti­cle is in press at Mem­o­ry & Cog­ni­tion (avail­able online). Our main find­ing is that stim­uli dif­fer­ing in the loca­tion of two spec­tral peaks were bet­ter cat­e­go­rized if there was a neg­a­tive cor­re­la­tion between the two spec­tral peaks than if there was a pos­i­tive cor­re­la­tion. Since neg­a­tive spec­tral cor­re­la­tions char­ac­ter­ize pho­net­ic speech prop­er­ties, our find­ings sug­gest that short-term audi­to­ry cat­e­go­ry learn­ing is influ­enced by long-term rep­re­sen­ta­tions of abstract acoustic-pho­net­ic prop­er­ties (here: spec­tral correlations).

Ref­er­ences

  • Scharinger M, Hen­ry MJ, Obleser J. Pri­or expe­ri­ence with neg­a­tive spec­tral cor­re­la­tions pro­motes infor­ma­tion inte­gra­tion dur­ing audi­to­ry cat­e­go­ry learn­ing. Mem Cog­nit. 2013 Jul;41(5):752–68. PMID: 23354998. [Open with Read]
Categories
Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Editorial Notes EEG / MEG Neural Oscillations Neural Phase Papers Perception Publications

New paper out: Hen­ry & Her­rmann, Jour­nal of Neuroscience

Proud to announce that our post­docs Mol­ly Hen­ry and Björn Her­rmann just came out with a review/op piece in the Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science “jour­nal club” sec­tion, where only grad stu­dents or post­docs are allowed to author short review pieces.

A Pre­clud­ing Role of Low-Fre­quen­cy Oscil­la­tions for Audi­to­ry Per­cep­tion in a Con­tin­u­ous Pro­cess­ing Mode

The Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science, 5 Decem­ber 2012, 32(49): 17525–17527; doi: 10.1523/​JNEUROSCI.4456–12.2012

Mol­ly and Björn review (and com­ment on) an impor­tant paper by our friends and col­leagues Christoph Kayser and Benedikt Ng in the same jour­nal. Essen­tial­ly, they argue for the dis­tinc­tion of a con­tin­u­ous from an oscil­la­to­ry pro­cess­ing mode in lis­ten­ing, and pro­vide ten­ta­tive expla­na­tions of why some­times miss­es might be more mod­u­lat­ed by neur­al oscil­la­to­ry phase than hits. Con­grats, guys!

Ref­er­ences

  • Hen­ry MJ, Her­rmann B. A pre­clud­ing role of low-fre­quen­cy oscil­la­tions for audi­to­ry per­cep­tion in a con­tin­u­ous pro­cess­ing mode. J Neu­rosci. 2012 Dec 5;32(49):17525–7. PMID: 23223276. [Open with Read]
Categories
Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Speech Processing EEG / MEG Media Neural Oscillations Publications Speech

DRa­dio broad­cast­ed three fea­tures on neur­al oscil­la­tions (Hen­ry & Obleser)

Ger­man radio broad­cast­er Deutsch­landra­dio pro­duced three recent reports on neur­al oscil­la­tions and our recent PNAS paper. You can lis­ten to/read (in Ger­man lan­guage) them here:

Next time we’ll post before the broad­cast­ing takes place…

Ref­er­ences

  • Hen­ry MJ, Obleser J. Fre­quen­cy mod­u­la­tion entrains slow neur­al oscil­la­tions and opti­mizes human lis­ten­ing behav­ior. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Dec 4;109(49):20095–100. PMID: 23151506. [Open with Read]
Categories
Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Speech Processing EEG / MEG Neural Oscillations Neural Phase Papers Publications Speech

New Paper in PNAS: Hen­ry & Obleser [Updat­ed]

Our new paper on neur­al entrain­ment with spec­tral fluc­tu­a­tions, and its effects on near-thresh­old audi­to­ry per­cep­tion is now online in the “ear­ly edi­tion” of PNAS:

Hen­ry, MJ & Obleser, J (in press):

Fre­quen­cy mod­u­la­tion entrains slow neur­al oscil­la­tions and opti­mizes human lis­ten­ing behavior

Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca (PNAS)


Here is the abstract:

The human abil­i­ty to con­tin­u­ous­ly track dynam­ic envi­ron­men­tal stim­uli, in par­tic­u­lar speech, is pro­posed to prof­it from “entrain­ment” of endoge­nous neur­al oscil­la­tions, which involves phase reor­ga­ni­za­tion such that “opti­mal” phase comes into line with tem­po­ral­ly expect­ed crit­i­cal events, result­ing in improved pro­cess­ing. The cur­rent exper­i­ment goes beyond pre­vi­ous work in this domain by address­ing two thus far unan­swered ques­tions. First, how gen­er­al is neur­al entrain­ment to envi­ron­men­tal rhythms: Can neur­al oscil­la­tions be entrained by tem­po­ral dynam­ics of ongo­ing rhyth­mic stim­uli with­out abrupt onsets? Sec­ond, does neur­al entrain­ment opti­mize per­for­mance of the per­cep­tu­al sys­tem: Does human audi­to­ry per­cep­tion ben­e­fit from neur­al phase reor­ga­ni­za­tion? In a human elec­troen­cephalog­ra­phy study, lis­ten­ers detect­ed short gaps dis­trib­uted uni­form­ly with respect to the phase angle of a 3‑Hz fre­quen­cy-mod­u­lat­ed stim­u­lus. Lis­ten­ers’ abil­i­ty to detect gaps in the fre­quen­cy-mod­u­lat­ed sound was not uni­form­ly dis­trib­uted in time, but clus­tered in cer­tain pre­ferred phas­es of the mod­u­la­tion. More­over, the opti­mal stim­u­lus phase was indi­vid­u­al­ly deter­mined by the neur­al delta oscil­la­tion entrained by the stim­u­lus. Final­ly, delta phase pre­dict­ed behav­ior bet­ter than stim­u­lus phase or the event-relat­ed poten­tial after the gap. This study demon­strates behav­ioral ben­e­fits of phase realign­ment in response to fre­quen­cy-mod­u­lat­ed audi­to­ry stim­uli, over­all sug­gest­ing that fre­quen­cy fluc­tu­a­tions in nat­ur­al envi­ron­men­tal input pro­vide a pac­ing sig­nal for endoge­nous neur­al oscil­la­tions, there­by influ­enc­ing per­cep­tu­al processing.

NB: There is also a press release by the Max Planck Soci­ety on the topic.

Ref­er­ences

  • Hen­ry MJ, Obleser J. Fre­quen­cy mod­u­la­tion entrains slow neur­al oscil­la­tions and opti­mizes human lis­ten­ing behav­ior. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Dec 4;109(49):20095–100. PMID: 23151506. [Open with Read]
Categories
Editorial Notes

Wel­come Malte Wöstmann

We wel­come Malte Wöst­mann, who grad­u­at­ed from the Cog­ni­tive Sci­ence pro­gram in Osnabrück, as a new PhD stu­dent in the group.

Malte will be part of the new (2012–2015) cohort of the Inter­na­tion­al Max Planck Research School “Neu­ro­com”.

By the way, Malte already worked with us as an intern in 2010 and recent­ly co-authored our J Neu­rosci arti­cle on alpha oscil­la­tions and work­ing mem­o­ry [see also press release].