Multisensory Perception LabWe had a wonderful time presenting at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) 2022 Annual Meeting in sunny San Francisco, California. Zhewei (“Cody”), Carli, and recently graduated Dr. Karthik each had a poster presentation. Cody also spoke at a data blitz talk and earned a $10 award for keeping his slides to the allotted time limit.
Let us know if you would like to further engage with our work! #CNS2022
Carli presenting poster presentation
Congratulations to Dr. Karthik G for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation!
Congratulations to Dr. David Brang for receiving tenure! This also means that Dr. Brang will soon receive the title of “associate” instead of “assistant” professor at the University of Michigan.
PostDoc opportunity available!
Help us research multisensory interactions, and particularly how vision modulates speech perception, using Cognitive Neuroscience techniques.
Also help with our large-scale brain tumor collaboration with Shawn Hervey-Jumper at UCSF (https://herveyjumperlab.ucsf.edu). In this collaboration, we collect iEEG (from ~50 patients/year) and lesion mapping data (from ~150 patients/year) in patients with a brain tumor to study sensory and cognitive functions in patients. The goals of this project are to better understand the physiology of tumors, study causal mechanisms of brain functions, and generalize iEEG/ECoG findings from epilepsy patients to a second patient population.
Email djbrang@umich.edu with your CV/cover letter.
Come chat with us at Society for Neuroscience 2021, which is taking place virtually this year. Look out for the different posters presented by our graduate students Karthik, EunSeon, and Cody, plus research technician Carli. See you there! #SfN2021
PostDoc opportunity available! Help us build computational models of cognitive/perceptual processes using ECoG and fMRI data. Interest in predictive coding and multisensory integration is a plus! Feel free to send application via email to zmliu@umich.edu or through the posting: https://careers.umich.edu/job_detail/196021/research_fellow
Dr. David Brang was recently quoted in an article about synesthesia featured in the Fall 2020, Mysteries issue of Popular Science. The article, “Why some people hear colors and taste words” introduces how extra connections in the brain can lead to the experience of mixed senses.
Graduate student Karthik was awarded a fellowship with the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering for the upcoming 2020-2021 year. The award will support his research project, “Computational modeling of auditory speech perception,” which involves the use and advancement of scientific computing techniques and practices. Congratulations!
In this article, we demonstrate that the human perceptual system exploits the natural correlation between mouth shape and auditory signal frequency to facilitate speech perception. Due to the acoustics physics of the oral cavity, changing the shape of the mouth (i.e., its width or narrowness) can be used to predict frequencies of auditory signals (oral resonances; “formants”) during speech. For example, when the lips are protruded (visually narrow), the oral cavity is elongated, producing a lower resonant frequency, like extending the slide on a trombone. By contrast, when the lips are retracted (visually wide), a higher resonant frequency is produced. In our study, participants were able to use visual speech cues to perceptually recover auditory frequency cues that were digitally degraded in our experiments. This process appeared to occur automatically, even when participants did not recognize audiovisual speech cues as being speech-related. Altogether, our results suggest that the perceptual system uses natural correlations between midlevel visual (oral deformations) and auditory speech features (frequency modulations) to facilitate speech perception.