Audition poses a particular challenge to cognitive neuroscience: First, the “bottom-up” processes of acoustically decoding and neurally encoding the auditory signal along the central auditory pathways are not well understood. Second, humans cope surprisingly well with various sorts of occlusions, deletions, and degradations in their auditory input—in phone lines and at noisy parties, in chronic hearing damage, or, most drastically, when living with a cochlear implant.

Our group is interested in the following main questions:

* How does the human brain analyse, categorise, and interpret meaningful sounds such as speech, particularly under substantial degradation?
* How do contextual cues facilitate this process: Semantic context, and also simple temporal or spectral regularities of sound can shape the neural processing as well as facilitate the integration of information.
* How can cognitive mechanisms effortfully compensate for degraded sound: Executive functions like working memory and cognitive control clearly support successful coping with degradation; their neural interfacing with auditory processes is unclear, however, and of particular relevance to our work.

These key questions touch on speech and hearing, psychology and neuroscience alike. We pursue them using listening and learning experiments and various methods of brain imaging.

First, we ask which brain areas within the auditory cortex, and beyond, contribute critically to the emergence of meaningful auditory and speech percepts, and how do they interact? This is investigated mainly using fMRI.

Second, we study the oscillatory brain dynamics (e.g. 5.1.2) using M/EEG to infer brain states that precede and accompany successful speech comprehension. In short, what are good indicators of facilitation and compensation in the time–frequency domain?

Third, we aim to isolate individual markers of auditory skills, cognitive ability, and brain structure that can help us predict the extent to which listeners will be able to cope with adverse listening situations.

Answers to these questions will further our knowledge on the listening brain as well as on the human faculty of speech comprehension. They will also eventually be useful in developing new approaches to the treatment of hearing disorders.

Jonas Obleser, PhD -- group leader
Mathias Scharinger, PhD -- Post doc
Molly Henry, PhD -- Post doc
Björn Herrmann, PhD -- Post doc
Julia Erb, MSc -- PhD student
Antje Strauß, M.A. -- PhD student
Anna Wilsch, Dipl.-Psych. -- PhD student
Dunja Kunke, MSc -- lab manager

(May 2011; from left to right: A. Wilsch; J. Erb; M. Scharinger; M. Henry; A. Strauß; J. Obleser)

Obleser J, Weisz N (2012) Suppressed alpha oscillations predict intelligibility of speech and its acoustic details. Cerebral Cortex. In press.

Obleser J, Meyer L, Friederici AD (2011) Dynamic assignment of neural resources in auditory comprehension of complex sentences. NeuroImage, 56(4):2310-2320.

Obleser, J., Kotz, S.A. (2011). Multiple brain signatures of integration in the comprehension of degraded speech. Neuroimage, 55(2):713-23.

Obleser, J., Kotz, S.A. (2010) Expectancy constraints in degraded speech modulate the speech comprehension network. Cerebral Cortex, 20(3): 633–640

Obleser, J., Wise, R.J.S., Dresner, M.A., Scott, S.K. ( 2007) Functional integration across brain regions improves speech perception under adverse listening conditions. Journal of Neuroscience, 27:2283–2289.

Obleser, J., Eisner, F., Kotz, S.A. (2008) Bilateral speech comprehension reflects differential sensitivity to spectral and temporal features. Journal of Neuroscience, 28(32):8116–8124.

Obleser, J., Leaver, A.M., Van Meter, J., Rauschecker, J.P. (2010) Segregation of vowels and consonants in human auditory cortex: Evidence for distributed hierarchical organization. Frontiers in Psychology. 1:232

Obleser, J., Zimmermann, J., Van Meter, J., Rauschecker, J.P. (2007) Multiple stages of auditory speech perception reflected in event-related fMRI. Cerebral Cortex, 17(10):2251–2257.

Obleser, J., Lahiri, A., Eulitz, C. (2004) Magnetic brain response mirrors extraction of phonological features from spoken vowels. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16(1):31–39.

Review Articles:
Obleser, J., Eisner, F. (2009) Pre-lexical abstraction of speech in the auditory cortex. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(1):14–19.

Petkov, C., Logothetis, N., Obleser, J. (2009) Where are the human speech and voice regions and do other animals have anything like them? The Neuroscientist, 15(5):419–429.

Weisz N, Hartmann T, Müller N, Obleser J (2011) Alpha Rhythms in Audition: Cognitive and Clinical Perspectives. Front Psychology 2:73.

If you are interested in working in our group please contact Jonas Obleser.