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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]
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Editorial Notes

Kick-Off: Wel­come to the new Obleser lab weblog

Wel­come to this col­lec­tion of news, facts and mis­cel­lanea from the Jonas Obleser “Cogn­tive Neu­ro­science of Speech” head­quar­ters. Cur­rent­ly, these head­quar­ters are sit­u­at­ed with­in the fan­tas­tic sci­en­tif­ic facil­i­ties that the Max Planck Insti­tute for Human Cog­ni­tive and Brain Sci­ences Leipzig and Prof. Dr. Angela Friederi­ci provide.

Our work focus­es on how the human brain analy­ses, (de–)codes and repairs incom­ing speech sig­nals. Our stud­ies are firm­ly root­ed in audi­to­ry neu­ro­science, yet also incor­po­rate par­a­digms and research ques­tions that are more lin­guis­tic or psy­cho­log­i­cal at times—in order to grasp a more com­pre­hen­sive under­stand­ing of the human brain’s amaz­ing fac­ul­ty to per­ceive and com­pre­hend speech.

We use main­ly func­tion­al MRI to study the brain lis­ten­ing to (often degrad­ed) speech, but EEG, MEG and behav­iour­al stud­ies are as well part of the arsenal.

Thanks for drop­ping by, and stay tuned.