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Although music performance has been widely studied in the behavioural sciences, less work has addressed the underlying neural mechanisms, perhaps due to technical difficulties in acquiring high-quality neural data during tasks requiring natural motion. The advent of wireless electroencephalography (EEG) presents a solution to this problem by allowing for neural measurement with minimal motion artefacts. In the current study, we provide the first validation of a mobile wireless EEG system for capturing the neural dynamics associated with piano performance. First, we propose a novel method for synchronously recording music performance and wireless mobile EEG. Second, we provide results of several timing tests that characterize the timing accuracy of our system. Finally, we report EEG time domain and frequency domain results from N=40 pianists demonstrating that wireless EEG data capture the unique temporal signatures of musicians' performances with fine-grained precision and accuracy. Taken together, we demonstrate that mobile wireless EEG can be used to measure the neural dynamics of piano performance with minimal motion constraints. This opens many new possibilities for investigating the brain mechanisms underlying music performance., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Objective: It has been suggested that the next major advancement in hearing aid (HA) technology needs to include cognitive feedback from the user to control HA functionality. In order to enable automatic brainwave-steered HA adjustments, attentional processes underlying speech-in-noise perception in aided hearing-impaired individuals need to be better understood. Here, we addressed the influence of two important factors for the listening performance of HA users - hearing aid processing and motivation - by analysing ongoing neural responses during long-term listening to continuous noisy speech., Methods: Sixteen normal-hearing (NH) and 15 linearly aided hearing-impaired (aHI) participants listened to an audiobook recording embedded in realistic speech babble noise at individually adjusted signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). A HA simulator was used for simulating a directional microphone setting as well as for providing individual amplification. To assess listening performance behaviourally, participants answered questions about the contents of the audiobook. We manipulated (1) the participants' motivation by offering a monetary reward for good listening performance in one half of the measurements and (2) the SNR by engaging/disengaging the directional microphone setting. During the speech-in-noise task, electroencephalography (EEG) signals were recorded using wireless, mobile hardware. EEG correlates of listening performance were investigated using EEG impulse responses, as estimated using the cross-correlation between the recorded EEG signal and the temporal envelope of the audiobook at the output of the HA simulator., Results: At the behavioural level, we observed better performance for the NH listeners than for the aHI listeners. Furthermore, the directional microphone setting led to better performance for both participant groups, and when the directional microphone setting was disengaged motivation also improved the performance of the aHI participants. Analysis of the EEG impulse responses showed faster N1P2 responses for both groups and larger N2 peak amplitudes for the aHI group when the directional microphone setting was activated, but no physiological correlates of motivation., Significance: The results of this study indicate that motivation plays an important role for speech understanding in noise. In terms of neuro-steered HAs, our results suggest that the latency of attentional processes is influenced by HA-induced stimulus changes, which can potentially be used for inferring benefit from noise suppression processing automatically. Further research is necessary to identify the neural correlates of motivation as an exclusive top-down process and to combine such features with HA-driven ones for online HA adjustments., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

With the advances of cochlear implant (CI) technology, many deaf individuals can partially regain their hearing ability. However, there is a large variation in the level of recovery. Cortical changes induced by hearing deprivation and restoration with CIs have been thought to contribute to this variation. The current review aims to identify these cortical changes in postlingually deaf CI users and discusses their maladaptive or adaptive relationship to the CI outcome. Overall, intra-modal and cross-modal reorganization patterns have been identified in postlingually deaf CI users in visual and in auditory cortex. Even though cross-modal activation in auditory cortex is considered as maladaptive for speech recovery in CI users, a similar activation relates positively to lip reading skills. Furthermore, cross-modal activation of the visual cortex seems to be adaptive for speech recognition. Currently available evidence points to an involvement of further brain areas and suggests that a focus on the reversal of visual take-over of the auditory cortex may be too limited. Future investigations should consider expanded cortical as well as multi-sensory processing and capture different hierarchical processing steps. Furthermore, prospective longitudinal designs are needed to track the dynamics of cortical plasticity that takes place before and after implantation., (Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The dynamic attending theory as originally proposed by Jones, 1976. Psychol. Rev. 83(5), 323-355 posits that tone sequences presented at a regular rhythm entrain attentional oscillations and thereby facilitate the processing of sounds presented in phase with this rhythm. The increased interest in neural correlates of dynamic attending requires robust behavioral indicators of the phenomenon. Here we aimed to replicate and complement the most prominent experimental implementation of dynamic attending (Jones et al., 2002. Psychol. Sci. 13(4), 313-319). The paradigm uses a pitch comparison task in which two tones, the initial and the last of a longer series, have to be compared. In-between the two, distractor tones with variable pitch are presented, at a regular pace. A comparison tone presented in phase with the entrained rhythm is hypothesized to lead to better behavioral performance. Aiming for a conceptual replication, four different variations of the original paradigm were created which were followed by an exact replication attempt. Across all five experiments, only 40 of the 140 tested participants showed the hypothesized pattern of an inverted U-shaped profile in task accuracy, and the group average effects did not replicate the pattern reported by Jones et al., 2002. Psychol. Sci. 13(4), 313-319 in any of the five experiments. However, clear evidence for a relationship between musicality and overall behavioral performance was found. This study casts doubt on the suitability of the pitch comparison task for demonstrating auditory dynamic attending. We discuss alternative tasks that have been shown to support dynamic attending theory, thus lending themselves more readily to studying its neural correlates. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled SI: Prediction and Attention., (Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

In our multisensory environment our sensory systems are continuously receiving information that is often interrelated and must be integrated. Recent work in animals and humans has demonstrated that input to one sensory modality can reset the phase of ambient cortical oscillatory activity in another. The periodic fluctuations in neuronal excitability reflected in these oscillations can thereby be aligned to forthcoming anticipated sensory input. In the auditory domain, the example par excellence is speech, because of its inherently rhythmic structure. In contrast, fluctuations of oscillatory phase in the visual system are argued to reflect periodic sampling of the environment. Thus rhythmic structure is imposed on, rather than extracted from, the visual sensory input. Given this distinction, we suggest that cross-modal phase reset subserves separate functions in the auditory and visual systems. We propose a modality-dependent role for cross-modal input in temporal prediction whereby an auditory event signals the visual system to look now, but a visual event signals the auditory system that it needs to hear what is coming. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled ., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Electrical artifacts caused by the cochlear implant (CI) contaminate electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings from implanted individuals and corrupt auditory evoked potentials (AEPs). Independent component analysis (ICA) is efficient in attenuating the electrical CI artifact and AEPs can be successfully reconstructed. However the manual selection of CI artifact related independent components (ICs) obtained with ICA is unsatisfactory, since it contains expert-choices and is time consuming. We developed a new procedure to evaluate temporal and topographical properties of ICs and semi-automatically select those components representing electrical CI artifact. The CI Artifact Correction (CIAC) algorithm was tested on EEG data from two different studies. The first consists of published datasets from 18 CI users listening to environmental sounds. Compared to the manual IC selection performed by an expert the sensitivity of CIAC was 91.7% and the specificity 92.3%. After CIAC-based attenuation of CI artifacts, a high correlation between age and N1-P2 peak-to-peak amplitude was observed in the AEPs, replicating previously reported findings and further confirming the algorithm's validity. In the second study AEPs in response to pure tone and white noise stimuli from 12 CI users that had also participated in the other study were evaluated. CI artifacts were attenuated based on the IC selection performed semi-automatically by CIAC and manually by one expert. Again, a correlation between N1 amplitude and age was found. Moreover, a high test-retest reliability for AEP N1 amplitudes and latencies suggested that CIAC-based attenuation reliably preserves plausible individual response characteristics. We conclude that CIAC enables the objective and efficient attenuation of the CI artifact in EEG recordings, as it provided a reasonable reconstruction of individual AEPs. The systematic pattern of individual differences in N1 amplitudes and latencies observed with different stimuli at different sessions, strongly suggests that CIAC can overcome the electrical artifact problem. Thus CIAC facilitates the use of cortical AEPs as an objective measurement of auditory rehabilitation., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Since Wood and McCarthy's simulation study (Electroenceph Clin Neurophysiol 1984;59:249-260), the use of principal component analysis (PCA) as a tool for the identification and quantification of event-related potentials (ERP) has been considered a challenge. Three relevant aspects have not been fully acknowledged in previous studies, however, and were therefore investigated in the present simulation study. Firstly, the impact of test power on the amount of variance misallocation was studied. Secondly, the impact of ERP component topography on variance misallocation was investigated. Thirdly, a systematic evaluation of variance misallocation in baseline-to-peak derived ERP measures was performed. Results based on an overall set of 2700 simulations indicate that: (a) variance misallocation is reduced to an almost acceptable level when an appropriate test power is simulated; (b) the overall amount of variance misallocation remains at an almost acceptable level when systematic topographic effects are simulated in combination with an appropriate test power; and (c) variance misallocation is in fact also a problem in baseline-to-peak measures. These findings confirm that, when used appropriately, PCA is a helpful and efficient tool for the identification and quantification of ERPs.