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Tag: Eisner

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Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Auditory Speech Processing Degraded Acoustics Executive Functions fMRI Noise-Vocoded Speech Papers Perception Publications Speech

New paper out: Erb, Hen­ry, Eis­ner & Obleser — Jour­nal of Neuroscience

We are proud to announce that PhD stu­dent Julia Erb just came out with a paper issued in Jour­nal  of Neu­ro­science:

The Brain Dynam­ics of Rapid Per­cep­tu­al Adap­ta­tion to Adverse Lis­ten­ing Conditions

Effects of adaptation

Grab it here:

Abstract:

Lis­ten­ers show a remark­able abil­i­ty to quick­ly adjust to degrad­ed speech input. Here, we aimed to iden­ti­fy the neur­al mech­a­nisms of such short-term per­cep­tu­al adap­ta­tion. In a sparse-sam­pling, car­diac-gat­ed func­tion­al mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing (fMRI) acqui­si­tion, human lis­ten­ers heard and repeat­ed back 4‑band-vocod­ed sentences 

Con­tin­ue read­ing “New paper out: Erb, Hen­ry, Eis­ner & Obleser — Jour­nal of Neuroscience”

Ref­er­ences

  • Erb J, Hen­ry MJ, Eis­ner F, Obleser J. The brain dynam­ics of rapid per­cep­tu­al adap­ta­tion to adverse lis­ten­ing con­di­tions. J Neu­rosci. 2013 Jun 26;33(26):10688–97. PMID: 23804092. [Open with Read]
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Editorial Notes Events Posters Publications

Neu­ro­science 2012 Posters and Talks

Dear friends and col­leagues, SfN Participants!

Please go and check out our posters in New Orleans this year.
It’s all hap­pen­ing in the Mon­day (15 Octo­ber) AM posters ses­sion, plus a bit of Tues­day AM, and one talk on mon­day AM as well. Thanks for your support!

TALK MONDAY AM, 10:30
321.11 — Selec­tive atten­tion to audi­to­ry tem­po­ral fea­tures sep­a­rates domain-gen­er­al from tim­ing-spe­cif­ic func­tions
*M. J. HENRY, J. OBLESER;
(in the Nanosym­po­sium 321. “Tim­ing and Tem­po­ral Pro­cess­ing I”)

MONDAY AM POSTER SESSION
366.05/FF7 — Alpha-band activ­i­ty reflects trade-off between tem­po­ral pre­pared­ness and cog­ni­tive load for speech in noise
*A. WILSCH, M. J. HENRY, B. MAESS, J. OBLESER

368.10/II3 — Cor­ti­cal dynam­ics and sub­cor­ti­cal mor­phol­o­gy pre­dict rapid adap­ta­tion to chang­ing spec­tro-tem­po­ral cues
*M. SCHARINGER, M. J. HENRY, J. ERB, J. OBLESER

368.14/II7 — Per­cep­tu­al adap­ta­tion to degrad­ed speech: Tun­ing in cor­ti­cal and sub­cor­ti­cal brain struc­tures
*J. ERB, M. J. HENRY1, F. EISNER, J. OBLESER

368.21/II14 — Slow fre­quen­cy mod­u­la­tion entrains neur­al delta oscil­la­tions and deter­mines human lis­ten­ing behav­ior
M. J. HENRY, *J. OBLESER

TUESDAY AM POSTER SESSION
595.14/CCC5 — With­in-sub­ject alpha pow­er is neg­a­tive­ly cor­re­lat­ed with sub­jec­tive intel­li­gi­bil­i­ty — A study of degrad­ed word com­pre­hen­sion in MEG.
*C. MCGETTIGAN, S. KOTZ, B. MAESS, S. SCOTT, J. OBLESER

595.23/CCC14 — Func­tion­al lat­er­al­iza­tion of the infe­ri­or frontal gyrus dur­ing sen­tence pro­cess­ing: The influ­ence of struc­tur­al lat­er­al­iza­tion and hand­ed­ness
*L. MEYER, J. OBLESER, A. D. FRIEDERICI

Categories
Degraded Acoustics fMRI Noise-Vocoded Speech Papers Publications Speech

New paper in press: Erb et al., Neu­ropsy­cholo­gia [Update]

I am very proud to announce our first paper that was entire­ly planned, con­duct­ed, analysed and writ­ten up since our group has been in exis­tence. Julia joined me as the first PhD stu­dent in Decem­ber 2010, and has since been busy doing awe­some work. Check out her first paper!

Audi­to­ry skills and brain mor­phol­o­gy pre­dict indi­vid­ual dif­fer­ences in adap­ta­tion to degrad­ed speech

Noise-vocod­ed speech is a spec­tral­ly high­ly degrad­ed sig­nal, but it pre­serves the tem­po­ral enve­lope of speech. Lis­ten­ers vary con­sid­er­ably in their abil­i­ty to adapt to this degrad­ed speech sig­nal. Here, we hypoth­e­sized that indi­vid­ual dif­fer­ences in adap­ta­tion to vocod­ed speech should be pre­dictable by non-speech audi­to­ry, cog­ni­tive, and neu­roanatom­i­cal fac­tors. We test­ed eigh­teen nor­mal-hear­ing par­tic­i­pants in a short-term vocod­ed speech-learn­ing par­a­digm (lis­ten­ing to 100 4- band-vocod­ed sen­tences). Non-speech audi­to­ry skills were assessed using ampli­tude mod­u­la­tion (AM) rate dis­crim­i­na­tion, where mod­u­la­tion rates were cen­tered on the speech-rel­e­vant rate of 4 Hz. Work­ing mem­o­ry capac­i­ties were eval­u­at­ed, and struc­tur­al MRI scans were exam­ined for anatom­i­cal pre­dic­tors of vocod­ed speech learn­ing using vox­el-based mor­phom­e­try. Lis­ten­ers who learned faster to under­stand degrad­ed speech showed small­er thresh­olds in the AM dis­crim­i­na­tion task. Anatom­i­cal brain scans revealed that faster learn­ers had increased vol­ume in the left thal­a­mus (pul­v­inar). These results sug­gest that adap­ta­tion to vocod­ed speech ben­e­fits from indi­vid­ual AM dis­crim­i­na­tion skills. This abil­i­ty to adjust to degrad­ed speech is fur­ther­more reflect­ed anatom­i­cal­ly in an increased vol­ume in an area of the thal­a­mus, which is strong­ly con­nect­ed to the audi­to­ry and pre­frontal cor­tex. Thus, indi­vid­ual audi­to­ry skills that are not speech-spe­cif­ic and left thal­a­mus gray mat­ter vol­ume can pre­dict how quick­ly a lis­ten­er adapts to degrad­ed speech. Please be in touch with Julia Erb if you are inter­est­ed in a preprint as soon as we get hold of the final, type­set manuscript.

[Update#1]: Julia has also pub­lished a blog post on her work.

[Update#2] Paper is avail­able here.

Ref­er­ences

  • Erb J, Hen­ry MJ, Eis­ner F, Obleser J. Audi­to­ry skills and brain mor­phol­o­gy pre­dict indi­vid­ual dif­fer­ences in adap­ta­tion to degrad­ed speech. Neu­ropsy­cholo­gia. 2012 Jul;50(9):2154–64. PMID: 22609577. [Open with Read]
Categories
Auditory Cortex Papers Publications

Obleser & Eis­ner in Trends Cogn Sci (in press) available

My year in sci­ence 2008 finds a sat­is­fy­ing end­ing by see­ing the fruits of my col­league Dr. Frank Eisner’s (cur­rent­ly ICN / UCL) and my own year­long efforts online.

Our opin­ion piece on how the prob­lem of pre-lex­i­cal abstrac­tion of speech in struc­tures of the audi­to­ry cor­tex should be best approached is final­ly avail­able as a beau­ti­ful and handy pre-print from Trends in Cog­ni­tive Sci­ences.

As a goody, I quote from the con­clu­sions rather than the open­ly avail­able abstract:

‘Behav­iour­al inves­ti­ga­tions in speech sci­ences and com­pu­ta­tion­al mod­el­ling have led to a detailed under­stand­ing of how the speech per­cep­tion sys­tem can be con­cep­tu­alised. While this type of research can­not by itself pro­duce a neu­roanatom­i­cal mod­el of speech pro­cess­ing, it should guide neu­ro­sci­en­tif­ic inves­ti­ga­tions by pro­vid­ing a the­o­ret­i­cal framework.

Using the cog­ni­tive sub­trac­tion method, func­tion­al neu­roimag­ing stud­ies have broad­ly defined the neu­roanato­my of pre-lex­i­cal pro­cess­ing. Mul­ti­vari­ate neu­roimag­ing tech­niques have the poten­tial to study spec­tro-tem­po­ral encod­ing and abstrac­tion of speech in more detail, and cru­cial­ly, in a man­ner that can be relat­ed to results from oth­er fields. […] We sug­gest that the out­put of these mul­ti­vari­ate meth­ods can serve as input to cog­ni­tive mod­els of speech per­cep­tion, in par­al­lel to behav­iour-based like­li­hoods that have been used in speech sci­ence, wave­form-based like­li­hoods that can be extract­ed with auto­mat­ic speech recog­ni­tion tech­niques, or spike-tim­ing pat­terns that have been observed in ani­mal studies.

The inte­gra­tion of find­ings from all of these areas, and the lat­est tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments with­in each of them, can lead to a testable, neu­roanatom­i­cal mod­el of pre-lex­i­cal abstraction.’

Feel free to mail me for reprints.

Ref­er­ences

  • Obleser J, Eis­ner F. Pre-lex­i­cal abstrac­tion of speech in the audi­to­ry cor­tex. Trends Cogn Sci. 2009 Jan;13(1):14–9. PMID: 19070534. [Open with Read]