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Magdalena Kachlicka

@mkachlicka.bsky.social
936 followers 1.4K following 59 posts

Postdoctoral Researcher @unibe.ch neuro.inf.unibe.ch & Honorary Research Fellow @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social @audioneurolab.bsky.social | speech + sounds + brains 🧠 cogsci, audio, neuroimaging, language, methods mkachlicka.github.io

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Reposted by Magdalena Kachlicka
Alejandro Blenkmann @ablenkmann.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
What do individual human neurons do when a sound violates expectations? In our new EJN paper, we characterize single- and multi-unit responses to several auditory deviants using microwire recordings from 13 patients. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author... #MMN #iEEG #PredictiveProcessing
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Earl K. Miller @earlkmiller.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Dimensionality reduction is how the brain acquires knowledge. Cool new paper from the late, great, Mark Stokes. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience
nature.com
Learning shapes neural geometry in the primate prefrontal cortex - Nature Neuroscience
Learning transforms prefrontal cortex activity from flexible, high-dimensional representations into compact, task-relevant and abstract codes, enabling efficient generalization of learned rules to new...
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
#NeuroJobs
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Reposted by Magdalena Kachlicka
animal prattle @animal-prattle.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
🦇🍸 bat cocktail party problem 🍸🦇 Like humans at a party, echolocating bats must pick out the sound they're interested in while ignoring out many others This review highlights roles of not just auditory but also "cognitive" brain areas in solving this problem #neuroskyence #bioacoustics #prattle 💬
Figure one from paper. Panel A at top shows cocktail party problem on the left, and bats echolocating on the right, highlighting similar challenges brains must solve in both settings: rapid scene dynamics, acoustic overlap, and source ambiguity. Boxes below both sides of the panel indicate different proposed neural and behavioral mechanisms to solve these problems. Bottom panel shows schematics of bat brain, with ascending auditory pathways on left and other areas traditionally considered "cognitive" on the right, that are involved with bat echolocation as discussed in the review
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
#NeuroJobs
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
#NeuroJobs
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Reposted by Magdalena Kachlicka
Yifei He 何奕菲 @yifeihe.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
Very happy that our manuscript with my brilliant collaborators @jamestrujillo.bsky.social and @straubeb.bsky.social is now published @jneurolang.bsky.social. 🥳🥳🥳 Interested in gesture, discourse, fMRI, prediction, computational modeling? This is the paper for you 👇 doi.org/10.1162/NOL....
doi.org
Discourse context and co-speech gestures jointly shape hierarchical prediction during the processing of a multimodal narrative
Abstract. Understanding one another in daily communication depends on predicting language from prior discourse context and visual signals, such as co-speech gestures. However, it remains unclear how d...
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Reposted by Magdalena Kachlicka
Shervin Safavi @neuroprinciplist.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
1/11 Happy to share our TICS paper on using the flexibility of one of the most basic cognitive functions, perception, to understand one of the most complex cognitive dysfunctions, psychiatric conditions (also my first formal work in computational psychiatry 🎉) 📄: www.cell.com/trends/cogni... 🧵 : 👇
cell.com
Perceptual multistability: a multifaceted window into brain dysfunctions
Perceptual multistability, observed across species and sensory modalities, offers valuable insights into numerous cognitive functions and dysfunctions. For instance, differences in temporal dynamics a...
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Reposted by Magdalena Kachlicka
Drew Schreiner @schreinerdrew.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Where, exactly, does learning happen in the brain? Out today in @nature.com, we identify a synaptic locus of birdsong learning and show that the circuit can be tuned to make birds learn faster - but at a cost. Read on👇 #neuroskyence 🧪 #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics Shareable link: rdcu.be/fiyrS
nature.com
A synaptic locus of song learning - Nature
Combining a computational framework and optogenetic and chemogenetic manipulations within and downstream of the cortico-basal ganglia circuit identifies the specific cortico-basal ganglia synapse...
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Reposted by Magdalena Kachlicka
Maria Geffen @geffenlab.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Our brain is constantly looking for patterns. When something unexpected happens, we notice it more in a predictable context, than in an unpredictable environment. Our study identifies how the auditory cortex amplifies responses to unexpected sounds in predictable contexts. doi.org/10.1523/jneu...
Two photon imagine was used to identify the neuronal circuit for amplify the responses to unexpected sounds in predictable contexts.
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Reposted by Magdalena Kachlicka
andrea e. martin @andreaeyleen.eurosky.social · 13/04/2026
OPEN POSTDOC position (part of @erc.europa.eu Consolidator DYNALANG) We build math&comp models of neural dynamics using insights from formal linguistics + ML Seeking theory-driven researchers w/ interests in language, neural dynamics, & math/comp neuroscience. Apply here: tinyurl.com/55exdpse
tinyurl.com
Postdoctoral Position in the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience of Language | Max Planck Institute
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
#NeuroJobs
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Reposted by Magdalena Kachlicka
Oscar Woolnough @owoolnough.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
Out now in #JNeurosci! We used direct recordings and stimulation in human pulvinar to probe its causal role during naming from pictures, and spoken and written descriptions. We found naming-selective responses and stim-induced pure anomia. doi.org/10.1523/JNEU... #NeuroSkyence #iEEG 🧵👇
doi.org
Medial Pulvinar Nucleus as a Causal Hub for Heteromodal Naming
Our ability to retrieve the names of objects in our environment is a fundamental aspect of everyday life. This process requires a complex, dynamic network of cortical and subcortical interactions. Whi...
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Reposted by Magdalena Kachlicka
Pierre Mégevand @vanmedge.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
"Real-time brain-controlled selective hearing enhances speech perception in multi-talker environments" in @natureportfolio.nature.com #NatNeurosci What a Dream Team of authors! #iEEG www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Real-time brain-controlled selective hearing enhances speech perception in multi-talker environments - Nature Neuroscience
This study shows that brain signals can identify and amplify the voice a person wants to hear in a crowded scene. Choudhari et al. provide evidence that brain-controlled hearing can improve speech per...
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Reposted by Magdalena Kachlicka
Sylvie Nozaradan @sylvienozaradan.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Intracerebral recordings in humans reveal emergence of musical beat representation across the dorsal auditory pathway Outstanding work from @tomaslenc.bsky.social, with Bruno Rossion and collaborators from CHU Nancy. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Feedback welcome #MusicScience #iEEG #neuroscience
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Overall, these findings suggest that individual cue weighting strategies are shaped by the ability to selectively attend to acoustic dimensions and that speech perception involves active, goal-directed selection of relevant information. 🧵5/5
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
This relationship held across both English and Mandarin speakers, although cross-task correlations were weaker in the Mandarin group, possibly reflecting ongoing adaptation to second-language prosodic patterns. 🧵4/5
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
We found consistent individual differences in the extent to which listeners relied on a single primary acoustic cue during prosodic categorization. Stronger selective attention was associated with greater reliance on primary cues, indicating that attention might drive cue prioritisation. 🧵3/5
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Why do people differ in how they weight acoustic information in speech? It could be that individuals with a more robust ability to direct selective attention to acoustic dimensions are better able to strongly weight a single primary cue, ignoring alternative sources of information. 🧵2/5
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
🚨New paper🚨 about the link between cue weighting and dimension-selective attention doi.org/10.1016/j.co... from fun times at @audioneurolab.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social with @ashleysymons.bsky.social Fred Dick, Kazuya Saito, @adamtierney.bsky.social 🧵1/5 #neuroskyence #psychscisky
doi.org
Redirecting
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Dirk Gütlin @gutlin.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
Neural circuits encode prior knowledge of temporal statistics www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Neural circuits encode prior knowledge of temporal statistics - Nature Neuroscience
This study shows that cerebellar circuits learn and encode prior probabilities of event timing. Cell-type-specific neural activity reflects environmental statistics and guides predictive motor behavio...
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Reposted by Magdalena Kachlicka
Mathias Sablé-Meyer @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Excited to see this Version Of Record of my work out in @elife.bsky.social! elifesciences.org/articles/106... We investigate the mental representation of geometric shapes in adults and children using fMRI and MEG. Each figure has a video of me explaining the figure: go and read it, or read below.
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
Our findings demonstrate that although default strategies in speech perception are difficult to resist, lifelong perceptual habits can be adjusted with as little as 3 hours of training.🧵5/5 #neuroskyence #psychscisky
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
The control group, who practiced English vocabulary, relied more on pitch in lexical stress categorization and phrase boundary production after training, suggesting that without targeted instruction, listeners default to existing strategies. 🧵4/5
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
After our novel prosody training, participants relied more on duration during phrase boundary categorization but showed no clear change for contrastive focus and lexical stress, suggesting that cue weighting training is most effective when targeting a feature’s primary cue. 🧵3/5
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
Learning a new language is challenging partly due to perceptual strategies inherited from our first language. For example, speakers of tone languages like Mandarin overuse pitch in English prosody perception and production. Can these strategies become more native-like with targeted training?🧵2/5
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
3rd🚨new paper🚨this year! Here we're looking at the effects of targeted training on how L2 learners weight perceptual cues doi.org/10.1017/S136... @audioneurolab.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social @ashleysymons.bsky.social, Yaoyao Ruan, Kazuya Saito, Fred Dick, @adamtierney.bsky.social 🧵1/5
doi.org
Effects of targeted perceptual training on L2 suprasegmental weighting strategies | Bilingualism: Language and Cognition | Cambridge Core
Effects of targeted perceptual training on L2 suprasegmental weighting strategies
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
These results suggest that perceptual strategies are shaped by the reliability of encoding at early stages of the auditory system. 🧵5/5
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
We find that neural tracking of pitch is linked to pitch cue weighting during word emphasis and lexical stress perception. Specifically, higher pitch weighting is linked to increased tracking of pitch at early latencies within the neural response, from 15 to 55 ms. 🧵4/5
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
Here, we tested the hypothesis that the reliability of early auditory encoding of a given dimension is linked to the weighting placed on that dimension during speech categorization. We tested this in 60 first language speakers of Mandarin learning English as a second language. 🧵3/5
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
Linguistic categories are conveyed in speech by many acoustic cues at the same time, but not all of them are equally important. There are clear and replicable individual differences in how people use those cues during speech perception, but the underlying mechanisms are unclear. 🧵2/5
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
🚨New paper🚨about mechanisms underlying individual differences in cue weighting doi.org/10.1162/IMAG... from fun times at @audioneurolab.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social with @ashleysymons.bsky.social, Kazuya Saito, Fred Dick, and @adamtierney.bsky.social #psychscisky #neuroskyence 🧵1/5
doi.org
Early neural encoding of pitch drives cue weighting during speech perception
Abstract. Linguistic categories are conveyed in speech by several acoustic cues simultaneously, so listeners need to decide how to prioritize different potential sources of information. There are robu...
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Reposted by Magdalena Kachlicka
Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
📜🎉 Our project on aperiodic neural activity during sleep, led by the wonderful @mosameen.bsky.social, is now published! This project shows how time-resolved measures of aperiodic neural activity track changes of sleep stages + lots of other analyses in iEEG & EEG! www.nature.com/articles/s44...
nature.com
Temporally resolved analyses of aperiodic features track neural dynamics during sleep - Communications Psychology
Sleep involves dynamic changes in brain activity that unfold over time, reflected in the brain’s aperiodic EEG patterns. Incorporating the spectral ‘knee’—a bend in the EEG power spectrum—reveals stag...
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
Together, these results suggest that the precision with which people perceive and remember sound patterns plays a major role in how well they understand accented speech, and that auditory training may help listeners who struggle. 🧵5/5
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
Native English speakers who were better at understanding the accent were also better at detecting pitch differences, remembering sound patterns, and attending to pitch. Musical training also helped. Better speech perception was also linked to stronger neural encoding of speech harmonics. 🧵4/5
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
In this study, we asked L1 English speakers to listen to the prosody of Mandarin-accented English. We found that some listeners are better at understanding accented speech than others. 🧵3/5
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
Non-native speakers of English speak with varying degrees of accent. So far, research has focused more on factors that help learners communicate more effectively. But what about the listeners? Are there factors that make it easier for native listeners to understand accented speech? 🧵2/5
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
🚨New paper🚨 about accented speech perception doi.org/10.1016/j.ba... by brilliant (MSc student at the time!) Amir Ghooch Kanloo accompanied by myself, Kazuya Saito and @adamtierney.bsky.social from fun times at @audioneurolab.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social 🧵1/5
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Redirecting
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Pierre Mégevand @vanmedge.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
"The Human Insula Reimagined: Single Neurons Respond to Simple Sounds during Passive Listening" Single neuron activity in the insula #iEEG in #JNeurosci @sfnjournals.bsky.social www.jneurosci.org/content/46/4...
jneurosci.org
The Human Insula Reimagined: Single Neurons Respond to Simple Sounds during Passive Listening
The insula is critical for integrating sensory information from the body with that arising from the environment. Although previous studies suggested that posterior insula is sensitive to sounds, these...
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changlabucsf.bsky.social @changlabucsf.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
New work from our lab showing the human frontal lobe receives fast, low-level speech information in **parallel** with early speech areas! 🧠🗣️ doi.org/10.1038/s414...
doi.org
Parallel encoding of speech in human frontal and temporal lobes - Nature Communications
Whether high-order frontal lobe areas receive raw speech input in parallel with early speech areas in the temporal lobe is unclear. Here, the authors show that frontal lobe areas get fast low-level sp...
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Reposted by Magdalena Kachlicka
Pierre Mégevand @vanmedge.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
"Human cortical dynamics of auditory word form encoding" by the Chang lab @changlabucsf.bsky.social, published in @cp-neuron.bsky.social www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... #iEEG #ECOG
cell.com
Human cortical dynamics of auditory word form encoding
Zhang, Leonard, et al. use high-density direct human brain recordings to reveal how the superior temporal gyrus (STG) detects word boundaries in natural speech and encodes whole auditory word forms. N...
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Magdalena Kachlicka @mkachlicka.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
#NeuroJobs
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Reposted by Magdalena Kachlicka
Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 18/11/2025
If you haven't, you should, it's brilliant!
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Adam Tierney @adamtierney.bsky.social · 04/11/2025
New preprint by Mika Nash and others on how selective attention affects neural tracking of prediction during ecologically valid music listening: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
Neural tracking of melodic prediction is pre-attentive
Music’s ability to modulate arousal and manipulate emotions relies upon formation and violation of predictions. Music is often used to modulate arousal and mood while individuals focus on other tasks,...
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Oscar Woolnough @owoolnough.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
As it's hiring season again I'm resharing the NeuroJobs feed. Add #NeuroJobs to your post if you're recruiting or looking for an RA, PhD, Postdoc, or faculty position in Neuro or an adjacent field. bsky.app/profile/did:...
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Greta Tuckute @gretatuckute.bsky.social · 19/08/2025
Humans largely learn language through speech. In contrast, most LLMs learn from pre-tokenized text. In our #Interspeech2025 paper, we introduce AuriStream: a simple, causal model that learns phoneme, word & semantic information from speech. Poster P6, tomorrow (Aug 19) at 1:30 pm, Foyer 2.2!
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Reposted by Magdalena Kachlicka
Elaine Francis @ejfranci2.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
My PhD student Yue Li is looking for L1 speakers of Chinese and Spanish for her online English experiment! Please see below for details!
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Reposted by Magdalena Kachlicka
Kelly Jakubowski @kellyjakubowski.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
Can you think of examples of books, films, TV shows, etc. featuring earworms or other types of imagined music? Please share them here! musicinmyhead.org/inner-music-...
musicinmyhead.org
Inner Music in Fiction and Biography - The Inner Music and Wellbeing Network
Inner Music in Fiction and Biography ‘Inner music’ or ‘musical imagery’ refers to the music that one hears in one’s own head. For example, an ‘earworm’ is a catchy piece of music that is stuck in one’...
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