Auditory Neuroscience Lab

Are high perceptual precision demands always necessary for training to drive auditory neural plasticity? 🧠 🔊🎙️ Find out more in this cool study with voice actors https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2024.06.016 by Magdalena Kachlicka & Adam Tierney Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London Birkbeck, University of London 🧵1/6

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Our brains have an internal GPS that guides us through physical space. But does it do more than that? A recent preprint from the lab shows that the brain’s navigation system also maps sound 🧠 🌎 🔉 Read more here: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.02.04.636440 🧵1/4

🔖PARTICIPANTS NEEDED for an exciting brain imaging study!🔖 We're looking for based participants who are native speakers of various langauges (e.g., Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Hungarian, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Greek, Ukrainian, Czech, and many others p if you are not sure if your language qualifies, please get in touch) who live in the UK for less than 3 years. 🧠🧠🧠

Does phrase-specific knowledge play a role in perceiving musicality in speech? Can that knowledge be consolidated in long-term memory and influence the perceived phrase musicality? 🎶💭🔁 Find some answers here: https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2024.41.5.348 Birkbeck, University of London Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London 🧵1/5

Rapid Learning and Long-term Memory in the Speech-to-song Illusion The speech-to-song illusion is a perceptual transformation in which a spoken phrase initially heard as speech begins to sound like song across repetitions. In two experiments, we tested whether phrase-specific learning and memory processes engaged by repetition contribute to the illusion. In Experim...

What makes speech and song distinguishable? Results from this global effort reveal that, despite cross-cultural differences, speech and song share some regularities🎶🎹🌍💬 Check the full paper for more details: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adm9797 Birkbeck, University of London Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London Science Advances

Around the world, music tends to have a higher, more stable pitch and slower timing than language does, according to a new analysis. https://scim.ag/70M

🔖PARTICIPANTS NEEDED for an exciting brain imaging study!🔖 We're looking for two groups of based participants (1) Native speakers of tonal languages (Mandarin or Cantonese Chinese) and (2) Native speakers of non-tonal langauges (e.g., Spanish, French, Italian) who live in the UK for less than 3 years. 🧠🧠🧠 Birkbeck, University of London Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London UCL PALS UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience Birkbeck Students' Union

🔖PARTICIPANTS NEEDED!🔖 We're looking for native English speakers to participate in two MSc projects - both studies use EEG and are investigating auditory perception Please support our MSc students and participate in their studies! 🙏 Birkbeck, University of London Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London Birkbeck Students' Union For more details see the adverts or check our website

Which statistics does the brain track while monitoring the rapid progression of sensory information? https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.01.08.574691 by Sijia Zhao, Benjamin Skerritt-Davis, Mounya Elhilali, Fred Dick & Maria Chait 🧵1/5

Sustained EEG responses to rapidly unfolding stochastic sounds reflect precision tracking The brain is increasingly viewed as a statistical learning machine, where our sensations and decisions arise from the intricate interplay between bottom-up sensory signals and constantly changing expectations regarding the surrounding world. Which statistics does the brain track while monitoring the...

New study by Kazuya Saito and team - Magdalena Kachlicka, Yui Suzukida, Ingrid Mora-Plaza, Yaoyao Ruan and Adam Tierney https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001166 examines whether and to what degree the composite model of acuity, attention, and integration can increase the predictive power of auditory processing for L2 learning.🛢1/5

Auditory processing as perceptual, cognitive, and motoric abilities underlying successful second language acquisition: Interaction model. A growing amount of attention has been given to examining the domain-general auditory processing of individual acoustic dimensions as a key driving force for adult L2 acquisition. Whereas auditory processing has traditionally been conceptualized as a bottom-up and encapsulated phenomenon, the intera...

Is listening performance bound to the specific characteristics of musical instrument training or other types of auditory expertise? Check https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105696 led by Francesco Caprini with Sijia Zhao, Maria Chait, Trevor Angus, Urlich Pomper, Fred Dick, and Adam Tierney 🧵1/5

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alert!🚨Can experience with the statistical regularities of speech and music increase the salience of informative dimensions within a given domain? Check https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/d4u93 by Ashley Symons and team (Magdalena Kachlicka, Raha Razin, Emily Wright, Fred Dick & Adam Tierney) 🧵1/5

Dimensional salience varies across verbal and nonverbal domains Information in speech and music is conveyed via multiple auditory dimensions. The informativeness of these dimensions tends to vary across domains, with pitch typically more informative for extracting musical content, and durational cues for exacting linguistic content in English speech. Some theori...