Talk COSY Februari 11/02/2020

IONS

11 février 2020

1:00 pm

auditorium 42 A, Martin V building - Woluwe

The COSY Division has the pleasure to invite you to the following talk

Dr Manuel VARLET

MARCS Institute (Western Sydney University)

"Neurophysiological processes underlying sensorimotor synchronization"

Humans synchronize every day their movements with visual and auditory rhythms in their environment, including those produced by other people. Such movement synchronization occurs intentionally but also often unintentionally. Here I will present a series of experiments that combined motion capture and electroencephalographic techniques to explore the perceptual-motor processes underlying the occurrence and stability of such movement synchronization. More specifically, I will discuss how differences in movement synchronization occurring across task constraints and individuals can be explained by differences in the sensory processing of the environmental rhythms.

Dr Mathieu BOURGUIGNON

Center of Research in Cognition and Neurosciences (ULB)

"Developmental trajectory of speech tracking in noise and link with literacy"

During connected speech listening, oscillatory activity within auditory cortices tracks speech rhythmicity at syllable (4–8 Hz) and phrasal (below 1 Hz) rates. In adults, such speech brain tracking (SBT) is also observed in speech-in-noise (SiN) conditions, and in that context, oscillatory brain activity aligns more to the attended speech than to the heard sound. This talk will present recent studies relying on SBT to better understand 1) the neuronal basis of the well-described difficulty of children to perceive SiN, 2) the impact of noise properties and audiovisual integration on SiN perception, and 3) the relation between SiN perception and reading abilities.

This research shows that tracking of SiN at phrasal and syllable rates parallels well documented behavioral effects: SBT and SiN perception (i) are more compromised by informational than non-informational masking, (ii) are enhanced when seeing lip movements, and (iii) increase from age 6 to 12. Our results also revealed substantial differences between SBT at phrasal and syllable rates: both maturation and seeing lip movements boosted syllable tracking globally and phrasal tracking selectively in informational noise conditions. Finally, these effects are behaviorally relevant since the ability to maintain SBT at phrasal rate in SiN conditions and to leverage visual speech information to boost it directly relate to reading abilities.

The talks will be followed by an afternoon coffee (please bring your cup!), for those who would like to discuss further with Manuel and Mathieu.