Mental Flow Estimation Through Wearable EEG.

Flow is a mental state experienced during holistic involvement in a certain task, and it is a factor that promotes motivation, development, and performance. A reliable and objective estimation of the flow is essential for moving away from the traditional self-reporting subjective questionnaires, and for developing closed-loop human-computer interfaces. In this study, we recorded EEG and pupil dilation in a cohort of participants solving arithmetic problems.

The neural response at the fundamental frequency of speech is modulated by word-level acoustic and linguistic information.

Spoken language comprehension requires rapid and continuous integration of information, from lower-level acoustic to higher-level linguistic features. Much of this processing occurs in the cerebral cortex. Its neural activity exhibits, for instance, correlates of predictive processing, emerging at delays of a few 100 ms.

Effect of visual input on syllable parsing in a computational model of a neural microcircuit for speech processing.

Seeing a person talking can help us understand them, particularly in a noisy environment. However, how the brain integrates the visual information with the auditory signal to enhance speech comprehension remains poorly understood.Here we address this question in a computational model of a cortical microcircuit for speech processing.

Modelling the effects of transcranial alternating current stimulation on the neural encoding of speech in noise.

Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) can non-invasively modulate neuronal activity in the cerebral cortex, in particular at the frequency of the applied stimulation. Such modulation can matter for speech processing, since the latter involves the tracking of slow amplitude fluctuations in speech by cortical activity. tACS with a current signal that follows the envelope of a speech stimulus has indeed been found to influence the cortical tracking and to modulate the comprehension of the speech in background noise.

Hearing Aids Do Not Alter Cortical Entrainment to Speech at Audible Levels in Mild-to-Moderately Hearing-Impaired Subjects.

Background: Cortical entrainment to speech correlates with speech intelligibility and attention to a speech stream in noisy environments. However, there is a lack of data on whether cortical entrainment can help in evaluating hearing aid fittings for subjects with mild to moderate hearing loss. One particular problem that may arise is that hearing aids may alter the speech stimulus during (pre-)processing steps, which might alter cortical entrainment to the speech.

Transcranial alternating current stimulation in the theta band but not in the delta band modulates the comprehension of naturalistic speech in noise.

Auditory cortical activity entrains to speech rhythms and has been proposed as a mechanism for online speech processing. In particular, neural activity in the theta frequency band (4-8 ​Hz) tracks the onset of syllables which may aid the parsing of a speech stream. Similarly, cortical activity in the delta band (1-4 ​Hz) entrains to the onset of words in natural speech and has been found to encode both syntactic as well as semantic information.

Decoding of selective attention to continuous speech from the human auditory brainstem response.

Humans are highly skilled at analysing complex acoustic scenes. The segregation of different acoustic streams and the formation of corresponding neural representations is mostly attributed to the auditory cortex. Decoding of selective attention from neuroimaging has therefore focussed on cortical responses to sound.