Dear fellow neuroscientists,
We would like to invite you to join us on Tuesday, October 11 at 1:00 pm EDT (UTC-4)
for the next edition of E.A.R.S. (Electronic Auditory Research Seminars), a monthly auditory seminar series focused on central auditory processing and circuits.
IMPORTANT: Please note that we have migrated the seminars to Zoom. You can access the
seminars here: https://pennmedicine.zoom.us/j/95396120820. This link is also posted on our website https://sites.google.com/view/ears2020/home.
The E.A.R.S. subscriber list will migrate from Crowdcast to the ears-seminar google group, which you can join by emailing: ears2022+subscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx or
visiting the following the link: https://groups.google.com/g/ears2022. If you want to stay subscribed, there is no need to do anything, your email address will be automatically
transferred.
Speakers:
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Karine Fenelon (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Title TBA
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Malte Wöstmann (Universität zu Lübeck): Behavioural and electrophysiological
signatures of auditory distraction in time and space
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Acoustic events in our environment are often relevant for behaviour, but irrelevant sounds can be powerful sources of distraction. Auditory attention is thought to enhance target sounds and to
suppress distraction. I will present evidence from behavioural and electroencephalography (EEG) studies in humans that elucidate the spatial and temporal dynamics of processing distracting sounds. First, when we decouple auditory target enhancement from distractor
suppression in spatial attention, we find two respective lateralized alpha oscillatory responses in the EEG (~10 Hz), which are uncorrelated. This demonstrates that the neurobiological foundation of auditory spatial attention implies a selection-independent
neural mechanism related to processing distraction. Second, when we vary the onset time of auditory distractors, we find that distractor onset co-modulates distractor-evoked behavioural detriments in memory performance and EEG responses in ~2–5 cycles per
second. This suggests that auditory distractibility is not uniformly distributed across time but exhibits spontaneous fluctuations on a sub-second time scale.
Additional upcoming E.A.R.S seminars (1:00 pm ET):
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11/01/2022: Professional Development session
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12/13/2022: Trainee Talks
With kind wishes,
Maria Geffen
Yale Cohen
Steve Eliades
Stephen David
Alexandria Lesicko
Nathan Vogler
Jean-Hugues Lestang
Huaizhen Cai