Biology subjects

van Wieringen, A.

Publications and source records attributed to van Wieringen, A..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Neural Tracking of Audiovisual Effects in Noise Using Deep Neural Network-Generated Virtual Humans

This study investigates the effectiveness of Deep Neural Network (DNN)-generated virtual humans in enhancing audiovisual speech perception in noisy environments, with a focus on using neural measures to quantify these effects. Lip movements are essential for speech comprehension, especially when auditory cues are degraded by noise. Traditional recording methods produce high-quality audiovisual materials but are resource intensive. This research explores the use of DNN avatars as a promising alternative, utilizing a commercially available tool to create realistic virtual humans. The study included both simple sentences and a short story to improve ecological validity. Eleven young, normal-hearing participants proficient in Flemish-Dutch listened to semantically meaningful sentences and a short story with various speaker types: a female FACS avatar, male and female DNN avatars, and a video of a human male speaker. The study included behavioral measures which consisted of an adaptive recall procedure and an adaptive rate procedure and electrophysiological measures consisting of neural tracking. Findings in the adaptive recall procedure showed consistent audiovisual benefits, with the human speaker offering the greatest benefit (-4.75 dB SNR), followed by the DNN avatar (-4.00 dB SNR) and the FACS avatar (-1.55 dB SNR). Additionally in the adaptive rate procedure, the DNN avatar improved speech intelligibility, with average SRTs enhancing from -7.17 dB SNR (audio-only) to -9.02 dB SNR (audiovisual). The results from the neural tracking procedure indicated that most participants experienced audiovisual benefits, particularly in the -9 dB SNR range, revealing that audiovisual cues provided by DNN avatars can enhance speech perception, validating these avatars as effective tools for studying audiovisual effects when using both behavioral measures and electrophysiological measures.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Improving source modeling of auditory steady-state responses with frequency-specific brain maps

Auditory steady-state responses (ASSRs) are evoked brain responses to modulated or repetitive acoustic stimuli. Due to a wide range of clinical and research applications, there is a great (clinical) interest to investigate the underlying neural generators of ASSRs. The cortical sources of ASSRs mostly are located in the auditory cortex (AC), although some studies avoiding prior assumptions regarding the number and location of the sources have also reported activity of sources outside of the AC. However, little is known about the number and location of these sources. In this study, we present a novel extension to minimum-norm imaging (MNI) which facilitates ASSR source reconstruction and provides a comprehensive and consistent picture of sources in response to low- as well as high modulation frequencies, monaurally presented to the left and right ears. Results demonstrate that the proposed MNI approach is successful in reconstructing sources located both within (primary) and outside (non-primary) of the AC. The locations of the non-primary sources are consistent with the literature. Primary sources are detected in every experimental condition, thereby corroborating the robustness of the approach. Moreover, we show that the MNI approach is capable of reconstructing the subcortical activities of ASSRs. In summary, the results indicate that the MNI approach outperforms the previously used method of group-ICA, in terms of detection of sources in the AC, reconstructing the subcortical activities and reducing computational load.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

The effect of presentation level on spectrotemporal modulation detection

The understanding of speech in noise relies (at least partially) on spectrotemporal modulation sensitivity. This sensitivity can be measured by spectral ripple tests, which can be administered at different presentation levels. However, it is not known how presentation level affects spectrotemporal modulation thresholds. In this work, we present behavioral data for normal-hearing adults which show that at higher ripple densities (2 and 4 ripples/oct), increasing presentation level led to worse discrimination thresholds. Results of a computational model suggested that the higher thresholds could be explained by a worsening of the spectrotemporal representation in the auditory nerve due to broadening of cochlear filters and neural activity saturation. Our results demonstrate the importance of taking presentation level into account when administering spectrotemporal modulation detection tests.

neuroscience↗