The Biological Psychology lab offers a master’s thesis on the cortical processing of natural speech stimuli. The goal of this project is to investigate the neural tracking of the fundamental frequency (F0) by human auditory cortex.

Neural responses in the auditory system phase-lock to both slow (envelope) and fast (temporal fine structure, F0) modulations in sound signals. Traditionally, such neural tracking of fast signal modulations has been attributed to auditory brainstem structures. Recent MEG work however suggests that auditory cortex neurons also track the temporal fine structure and the fundamental frequency of sound signals. The goal of this master’s thesis is to replicate this finding in a new dataset and for different stimulus types (isolated speech syllables, continuous natural speech).

The master student will assist in MEG data acquisition at the local Neuroimaging Center and analysze MEG data in source space. Prior experience with EEG/MEG data, interest in MEG data analysis methods, and a good command of Matlab are advantageous.

If you are interested, please contact sebastian.puschmann@uol.de for details.