Lab Members Receive Awards!

Dr. Brang was recognized by the U-M Provost’s Neuroscience Scholars Committee for excellent contributions to the field. See the article here!

Graduate Student Cody (Zhewei) Cao is this year’s Lustig Graduate Travel Award recipient! He has earned the award for international (and domestic) travel to attend conferences, obtain training, and conduct research.

CNS 2022: Come Chat with Us!

We 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 with poster that says: "A" is lobster red: Intracranial EEG recordings show fast synesthetic conflict in the insula

Carli presenting poster presentation

Dr. Brang promoted!

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.

Now Hiring: PostDoc Position

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.

Publication: Vision perceptually restores auditory spectral dynamics in speech

 

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.