People - Auditory Cognition

Current Members

Jonas studied Psychology with a minor in Statistics and got his degree from the University of Konstanz in 2004. After doing research at University College London and at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, he has held a Chair in Physiological Psychology and Research Methods at the University of Lübeck since 2016.

Currently, his main interests lie in neural dynamics, that is, the moment-to-moment brain states as well as more stable brain traits that characterise our perception and behaviour. An important question for Jonas is whether there are features of neural dynamics that are especially adaptive or protective to our health as we get older. His preferred model system still is the listening human being.

Jonas’ research has been supported by the ERC (2016–2021), the DFG (2015—), the Max Planck Society (2010–2015) and various partners in the hearing aid industry. Jonas serves as handling editor for the Journal of Neuroscience and eLife.

Jonas loves typography, which can be a pain when you design figures or manuscripts with him.

Google Scholar • PubMed • jonasobleser.com • ResearcherID

Mohsen Alavash
Postdoctoral researcher

Mohsen’s background is in biomedical engineering. He received his PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Oldenburg in 2015. During his PhD he investigated how brain networks enable us to resolve cognitive challenges, and why it occasionally fails to do so reflecting its capacity limits. To follow-up this question as a postdoc, he has been studying the relation between brain networks and behavior in challenging listening tasks at the Max-Planck Institute in Leipzig and currently at the University of Lübeck. To this end, he adopts graph-theoretical network analysis of the human functional connectome built upon the brain hemodynamic responses or neuronal oscillations.

He loves extracting knowledge from complex data, and is good at making typos.

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Franziska Scharata
Lab manager, Audiologist

Sarah Tune
Postdoctoral researcher

Sarah received a B.A. degree in Language and Communication studies as well as a PhD in Neurolinguistics from the University of Marburg, Germany, where she worked on the neurophysiological signatures and the neural networks that support language comprehension.

She then spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Irvine before joining the Auditory Cognition research group in 2016.

Her main research interests follow the question of how the human brain achieves the remarkable feat of processing and comprehending language under at times extremely challenging conditions and in the face of age-related neural, cognitive and sensory decline. Sarah is particularly interested in understanding how different neural and cognitive strategies work together to enable successful listening. Most of the time you will find her deeply immersed in building ever more complex models predicting human speech comprehension.

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Malte Wöstmann
Postdoctoral researcher

Malte studied Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück and finished his Master’s degree in 2012. Form 2012 to 2015, he did his PhD at the Max-Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig in the research group ‘Auditory Cognition’, under supervision of Jonas Obleser. Since 2015, Malte is working as a Post-doc in the Department of Psychology at the University of Lübeck.

His research focuses on the electrophysiological dynamics of human auditory attention. Malte is currently mainly interested in how the neural system accomplishes the suppression of distracting information in order to focus attention on relevant stimuli.

Malte loves simplicity, having concise hypotheses, and neat experimental designs.

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Hong-Viet Victor Ngo
Postdoctoral researcher

Hong-Viet (or Hongi) studied Physics at the University of Kiel but then got captured by the field of Cognitive Neuroscience, in which he completed a PhD at the Universities of Lübeck and Tübingen in 2014. Afterwards, he gathered research experience as a Postdoc abroad at the University of Birmingham (UK) and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour (NL). Since 2020, Hongi is back at the University of Lübeck as a Postdoc in the Auditory Cognition group.

His research examines the causal role of brain rhythms on the consolidation of memories during sleep. To this end, Hongi utilizes different non-invasive brain stimulation techniques in real-time experiments and, of late, multivariate decoding techniques. As a stimulation aficionado, he is always on the lookout for new technical advances to nudge the brain and unravel or perhaps even ameliorate the function of sleep.

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Léon Franzen
Postdoctoral researcher

Léon received an MSc and a PhD in Psychology/Neuroscience from the University of Glasgow where he focused on audio-visual perceptual decision-making and the perceptual and cognitive aspects of reading in adults with dyslexia using EEG and eye-tracking methods. His research experience further includes computational modelling of visual and audio-visual decisions and perceptual aspects of consumer psychology. Léon has spent the past two years at Concordia University in Montreal (Canada) exploring new visual marketing tools that could facilitate information processing in adults with dyslexia.

In his investigations he has used a variety of complementary techniques including EEG, eyetracking, galvanic skin response, response times, and behavioral modelling of decision processes to examine cognitive decision processes from various angles.

When not immersed in multiple papers at once, Léon is an avid basketball player and coach.

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Markus Kemper
PhD student

Markus started his dual apprenticeship as a trained hearing acoustician in 2012, which he successfully completed in 2015. Afterwards, he studied hearing acoustics in Lübeck and received his Master’s degree in 2020. During his Master’s he spent one year at the Sonova AG in Switzerland, where he first came into contact with his current research topic ‘Listening Effort’ (LE). He joined the Auditory Cognition group in 2020 within a collaborative project with the German Institute of Hearing Aids.

His research includes the modelling and decoding of LE. He is particularly interested in developing test methods that measure and manipulate different dimensions of LE.

Martin Orf
PhD student

Martin is a trained hearing acoustician. He finished his dual apprenticeship in 2014. Based on his apprenticeship, he received his B.Sc in hearing acoustics in 2017 in Lübeck. From 2017 to 2019, he did his M.Sc in hearing technology at the university of Lübeck. During his master´s, he came into contact with the auditory cognition group. After his internship and master thesis in the Obleser group, he started his PhD investigating the mechanism of active ignoring in normal and hearing-impaired listeners.

He is interested in creating virtual and realistic sound scenarios in the spatial lab. Especially, the mechanisms of ignoring works in such scenarios, e.g. cocktail-party, are of interest for him. Based on his background, he is concerned in how active ignoring works especially in hearing-impaired people and to investigate which hearing aid features could be used to facilitate ignoring on an engineering level.

Troby Lui
PhD student

Troby received both her B.S.Sc. as well as M.Phil. degree in Psychology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. During her MPhil study, she focused on the contribution of the frontal cortex to building the prediction model of ignored stimuli by using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and EEG.

Afterwards, she joined the Auditory Cognition group in 2019 to pursue her research interest in how attentional filtering unfolds in time. In particular, she wants to understand the rhythmicity underlying distraction suppression and its manifestation in brain-behavior relations.

Frauke Kraus
PhD student

Frauke received her B.Sc. in Medical Technology from the Universities of Tübingen and Stuttgart and her M.Sc. in Auditory Technology of the University of Lübeck. During her internship and master thesis in the Auditory Cognition group she developed a fascination for the field of auditory neuroscience.

Frauke is currently working on her PhD (supervised by Jonas and Björn Herrmann, Rotman Research Institute and University of Toronto). She is interested how different levels of attentional resource recruitment affect neural oscillations during listening, and the extent to which this oscillatory activity can be used as a marker of listening effort.

Merle Schuckart
PhD student

Merle received both her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree in Psychology from the University of Kiel. After having completed her studies in 2022, Merle joined the Auditory Cognition Group as a PhD student within a collaborative project with the Max-Planck-Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. In her project, she investigates the influence of domain-general networks on natural language processing.