Anne Keitel

• Dr. rer. nat. (PhD)
• Lecturer at University of Dundee

The human brain can be parcellated into diverse anatomical areas. We investigated whether rhythmic brain activity in these areas is characteristic and can be used for automatic classification. To this end, resting-state MEG data of 22 healthy adults was analysed. Power spectra of 1-s long data segments for atlas-defined brain areas were clustered i...

The timing of slow auditory cortical activity aligns to the rhythmic fluctuations in speech. This entrainment is considered to be a marker of the prosodic and syllabic encoding of speech, and has been shown to correlate with intelligibility. Yet, whether and how auditory cortical entrainment is influenced by the activity in other speech–relevant ar...

During online speech processing, our brain tracks the acoustic fluctuations in speech at different timescales. Previous research has focused on generic timescales (for example, delta or theta bands) that are assumed to map onto linguistic features such as prosody or syllables. However, given the high intersubject variability in speaking patterns, s...

Visual speech carried by lip movements is an integral part of communication. Yet, it remains unclear in how far visual and acoustic speech comprehension are mediated by the same brain regions. Using multivariate classification of full-brain MEG data, we first probed where the brain represents acoustically and visually conveyed word identities. We t...

Our ability to predict upcoming events is a fundamental component of human cognition. One way in which we do so is by exploiting temporal regularities in sensory signals: the ticking of a clock, falling of footsteps and the motion of waves each provide a structure that may facilitate anticipation. But how strong is the effect of rhythmic anticipati...

Endogenous brain rhythms are at the core of neurobiological speech theories. These brain rhythms have been proposed to play a role for speech segmentation, attention allocation and temporal and spectral processes during speech perception. However, despite the strong theoretical foundations, direct empirical evidence for the involvement of endogenou...

Slow, endogenous brain rhythms in auditory cortex are hypothesized to track acoustic amplitude modulations during speech comprehension. Temporal predictions from the motor system are thought to enhance this tracking. However, direct evidence for the involvement of endogenous auditory and motor brain rhythms is lacking. Combining magnetoencephalogra...

The cortical tracking of stimulus features is a crucial neural requisite of how we process continuous music. We here tested whether cortical tracking of the beat, typically related to rhythm processing, is modulated by pitch predictability and other top‐down factors. Participants listened to tonal (high pitch predictability) and atonal (low pitch p...

Cortical tracking of stimulus features (such as the envelope) is a crucial tractable neural mechanism, allowing us to investigate how we process continuous music. We here tested whether cortical and behavioural tracking of beat, typically related to rhythm processing, are modulated by pitch predictability. In two experiments (n=20, n=52), participa...

Brain rhythms at different timescales are observed ubiquitously across cortex. Despite this ubiquitousness, individual brain areas can be characterized by ‘spectral profiles’, which reflect distinct patterns of endogenous brain rhythms. Crucially, endogenous brain rhythms have often been explicitly or implicitly related to perceptual and cognitive...

The most prominent acoustic features in speech are intensity modulations, represented by the amplitude envelope of speech. Synchronization of neural activity with these modulations supports speech comprehension. As the acoustic modulation of speech is related to the production of syllables, investigations of neural speech tracking commonly do not d...

When speech is too fast, the tracking of the acoustic signal along the auditory pathway deteriorates, leading to suboptimal speech segmentation and decoding of speech information. Thus, speech comprehension is limited by the temporal constraints of the auditory system. Here we ask whether individual differences in auditory-motor coupling strength i...

Listening to speech with poor signal quality is challenging. Neural speech tracking of degraded speech has been used to advance the understanding of how brain processes and speech intelligibility are interrelated. However, the temporal dynamics of neural speech tracking and their relation to speech intelligibility are not clear. In the present MEG...

Listening to speech with poor signal quality is challenging. Neural speech tracking of degraded speech has been used to advance the understanding of how brain processes and speech intelligibility are interrelated, however the temporal dynamics of neural speech tracking are not clear. In the present MEG study, we thereby exploited temporal response...

Speech is an intrinsically multisensory signal, and seeing the speaker's lips forms a cornerstone of communication in acoustically impoverished environments. Still, it remains unclear how the brain exploits visual speech for comprehension. Previous work debated whether lip signals are mainly processed along the auditory pathways or whether the visu...

When speech is too fast, the tracking of the acoustic signal along the auditory pathway deteriorates, leading to suboptimal speech segmentation and decoding of speech information. Thus, speech comprehension is limited by the temporal constraints of the auditory system. Previous research suggests that individual differences in auditory-motor couplin...

Speech is an intrinsically multisensory signal and seeing the speaker’s lips forms a cornerstone of communication in acoustically impoverished environments. Still, it remains unclear how the brain exploits visual speech for comprehension and previous work debated whether lip signals are mainly processed along the auditory pathways or whether the vi...

Fluctuations in arousal, controlled by subcortical neuromodulatory systems, continuously shape cortical state, with profound consequences for information processing. Yet, how arousal signals influence cortical population activity in detail has so far only been characterized for a few selected brain regions. Traditional accounts conceptualize arousa...

The integration of visual and auditory cues is crucial for successful processing of speech, especially under adverse conditions. Recent reports have shown that when participants watch muted videos of speakers, the phonological information about the acoustic speech envelope, which is associated with but independent from the speakers’ lip movements,...

Spectral fingerprints (SFs) are unique power spectra signatures of human brain regions of interest (ROIs, Keitel & Gross, 2016). SFs allow for accurate ROI identification and can serve as biomarkers of differences exhibited by non-neurotypical groups. At present, there are no open-source, versatile tools to calculate spectral fingerprints. We have...

Fluctuations in arousal, controlled by subcortical neuromodulatory systems, continuously shape cortical state, with profound consequences for information processing. Yet, how arousal signals influence cortical population activity in detail has only been characterized for a few selected brain regions so far. Traditional accounts conceptualize arousa...

The integration of visual and auditory cues is crucial for successful processing of speech, especially under adverse conditions. Recent reports have shown that when participants watch muted videos of speakers, the phonological information about the acoustic speech envelope is tracked by the visual cortex. However, the speech signal also carries muc...

The most prominent acoustic features in speech are intensity modulations, represented by the amplitude envelope of speech. Synchronization of neural activity with these modulations is vital for speech comprehension. As the acoustic modulation of speech is related to the production of syllables, investigations of neural speech tracking rarely distin...

Congenital blindness has been shown to result in behavioral adaptation and neuronal reorganization, but the underlying neuronal mechanisms are largely unknown. Brain rhythms are characteristic for anatomically defined brain regions and provide a putative mechanistic link to cognitive processes. In a novel approach, using magnetoencephalography rest...

Visual speech carried by lip movements is an integral part of communication. Yet, it remains unclear in how far visual and acoustic speech comprehension are mediated by the same brain regions. Using multivariate classification of full-brain MEG data, we first probed where the brain represents acoustically and visually conveyed word identities. We t...

Visual speech carried by lip movements is an integral part of communication. Yet, it remains unclear in how far visual and acoustic speech comprehension are mediated by the same brain regions. Using multivariate classification of full-brain MEG data, we first probed where the brain represents acoustically and visually conveyed word identities. We t...

The human cortex is characterized by local morphological features such as cortical thickness, myelin content, and gene expression that change along the posterior-anterior axis. We investigated if some of these structural gradients are associated with a similar gradient in a prominent feature of brain activity - namely the frequency of oscillations....

The human cortex is characterized by local morphological features such as cortical thickness, myelin content, and gene expression that change along the posterior-anterior axis. We investigated if some of these structural gradients are associated with a similar gradient in a prominent feature of brain activity - namely the frequency of oscillations....

The human cortex is characterized by local morphological features such as cortical thickness, myelin content, and gene expression that change along the posterior-anterior axis. We investigated if some of these structural gradients are associated with a similar gradient in a prominent feature of brain activity - namely the frequency of oscillations....

Making sense of a poor auditory signal can pose a challenge. Previous attempts to quantify speech intelligibility in neural terms have usually focused on one of two measures, namely low‐frequency speech‐brain synchronization or alpha power modulations. However, reports have been mixed concerning the modulation of these measures, an issue aggravated...

The human cortex is characterized by local morphological features such as cortical thickness, myelin content and gene expression that change along the posterior-anterior axis. We investigated if these structural gradients are associated with a similar gradient in a prominent feature of brain activity - namely the frequency of brain oscillations. In...

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translate...

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translate...

The human brain exhibits rhythms that are characteristic for anatomical areas and presumably involved in diverse perceptual and cognitive processes. Visual depriva-tion results in behavioral adaptation and cortical reorganization, particularly affect-ing sensory cortices. Whether these plasticity-related changes are accompanied by altered spectral...

In the motor cortex, beta oscillations (∼12-30 Hz) are generally considered a principal rhythm contributing to movement planning and execution. Beta oscillations cohabit and dynamically interact with slow delta oscillations (0.5-4 Hz), but the role of delta oscillations and the subordinate relationship between these rhythms in the perception-action...

Visual speech is an integral part of communication. Yet it remains unclear whether semantic information carried by movements of the lips or tongue is represented in the same brain regions that mediate acoustic speech representations. Behaviourally, our ability to understand acoustic speech seems independent from that to understand visual speech, bu...

Understanding speech can pose a challenge, especially when speech is perceived as degraded, for example when using a hearing aid. Findings on brain dynamics involved in degraded speech comprehension are mixed. We therefore investigated the effects of degraded continuous speech on three measures: intelligibility, theta synchronization, and alpha pow...

Two largely independent research lines use rhythmic sensory stimulation to study visual processing. Despite the use of strikingly similar experimental paradigms, they differ crucially in their notion of the stimulus-driven periodic brain responses: one regards them mostly as synchronized (entrained) intrinsic brain rhythms; the other assumes they a...

The Glasgow Norms are a set of normative ratings for 5,553 English words on nine psycholinguistic dimensions: arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, imageability, familiarity, age of acquisition, semantic size, and gender association. The Glasgow Norms are unique in several respects. First, the corpus itself is relatively large, while simultane...

Two largely independent research lines use rhythmic sensory stimulation to study visual processing. Despite the use of strikingly similar experimental paradigms, they differ crucially in their notion of the stimulus-driven periodic brain responses: One regards them mostly as synchronised (entrained) intrinsic brain rhythms; the other assumes they a...

Comparison of MI values at peak grid points in PM gyrus, MTG, and HG for syllable and phoneme scales. Boxes denote interquartile range with median line; error bars show minimum and maximum, excluding outliers. None of the comparisons reached significance (all pFDR > .56, puncorrected > .20). Data deposited in the Dryad repository: https://doi.org/1...

Analyses in generic 2 Hz–wide bands. Seven overlapping frequency bands were analysed (from 0–8 Hz, in 2 Hz–wide bands, in 1-Hz steps). The first 3 of these bands are displayed here. (A) Perceptually relevant tracking (larger MI for correctly comprehended than incorrectly comprehended trials) was found at the 1–3 Hz scale (Tsum(19) = 1,078.85, pclus...

Power spectral density estimates of speech envelope and pitch. Welch’s periodograms are shown for speech envelopes (A) and fundamental frequency (F0-contours/pitch) (B) of all 180 stimulus sentences (thin gray lines) and their average (thick black line), for frequencies between 0.1 and 12 Hz (in 0.1-Hz steps). For envelope spectra, visible peaks th...

Emotion (positive and negative) words are typically recognized faster than neutral words. Recent research suggests that emotional valence, while often treated as a unitary semantic property, may be differentially represented in concrete and abstract words. Studies that have explicitly examined the interaction of emotion and concreteness, however, h...

During online speech processing, our brain tracks the acoustic fluctuations in speech at different time-scales. Previous research has focussed on generic time-scales (for example, delta or theta bands) that are assumed to map onto linguistic features such as prosody or syllables. However, given the high inter-subject variability in speaking pattern...

The Glasgow Norms are a set of normative ratings for 5,553 English words on 9 psycholinguistic dimensions: arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, imageability, familiarity, age of acquisition, semantic size, and gender association. The Glasgow Norms are unique in several respects. First, the corpus, itself, is relatively large while simultaneou...

Data for regression analysis of mean rank and location. (first column) Region of interest (ROI) number in AAL atlas. (second column) Mean rank of classification analysis for each area. (third column) Radius r (in cm) from the centre of the brain for each area (centre of ROI). (XLSX)

Spectral profiles of superior frontal areas. Clustered power spectra in source space represent normalised power, i.e., spectral power in comparison to the whole brain. Legends show the corresponding duration of each pattern (i.e., the percentage of trials in which each spectrum was present on average during recording). Shaded error bars illustrate...

Spectral profiles of parietal areas. Clustered power spectra in source space represent normalised power, i.e., spectral power in comparison to the whole brain. Legends show the corresponding duration of each pattern (i.e., the percentage of trials in which each spectrum was present on average during recording). Shaded error bars illustrate the stan...

Spectral profiles of occipital areas. Clustered power spectra in source space represent normalised power, i.e., spectral power in comparison to the whole brain. Legends show the corresponding duration of each pattern (i.e., the percentage of trials in which each spectrum was present on average during recording). Shaded error bars illustrate the sta...

Spectral profiles of temporal areas. Note that this division is arbitrary, and that other divisions are possible. Clustered power spectra in source space represent normalised power, i.e., spectral power in comparison to the whole brain. Legends show the corresponding duration of each pattern (i.e., the percentage of trials in which each spectrum wa...

Spectral profiles of areas of the limbic system. Clustered power spectra in source space represent normalised power, i.e., spectral power in comparison to the whole brain. Legends show the corresponding duration of each pattern (i.e., the percentage of trials in which each spectrum was present on average during recording). Shaded error bars illustr...

Data for regression analysis of cluster numbers and location. (first column) ROI number in AAL atlas. (second column) Optimal number of clusters for each area according to Silhouette criterion. (third column) Radius r (in cm) from the centre of the brain for each area (centre of ROI). (XLSX)

Data for comparison of spectral modes between rest and listening. (left) Tables show amplitude means and standard error of means across participants for all comparable modes in left (upper panel) and right (lower panel) PAC. (right) For the same modes, single subject data are shown. These consist of amplitudes of individual peaks that contributed t...

Binary hierarchical cluster tree resulting from similarity analysis of posterior probabilities. (a) Full dendrogram, cut at a maximum of 20 clusters. (b and c) Left and right part of the dendrogram with area labels. (TIF)

Spectral profiles of inferior frontal areas. Clustered power spectra in source space represent normalised power, i.e., spectral power in comparison to the whole brain. Legends show the corresponding duration of each pattern (i.e., the percentage of trials in which each spectrum was present on average during recording). Shaded error bars illustrate...

Spectral profiles of areas of the basal ganglia. Clustered power spectra in source space represent normalised power, i.e., spectral power in comparison to the whole brain. Legends show the corresponding duration of each pattern (i.e., the percentage of trials in which each spectrum was present on average during recording). Shaded error bars illustr...

Distribution of peak frequencies. (left) Histogram of peak frequencies with strongest power across all 115 brain areas. Bin width is adapted for each frequency band according to number of frequencies within each band. (middle) Topography of peak frequency in cluster with strongest power (colour-coded; red: delta, green: theta, blue: alpha, orange:...

Peak frequency per anatomical area. Analysis of peak frequencies with strongest power for all brain areas. (DOCX)

Spectral profiles of central areas. Clustered power spectra in source space represent normalised power, i.e., spectral power in comparison to the whole brain. Legends show the corresponding duration of each pattern (i.e., the percentage of trials in which each spectrum was present on average during recording). Shaded error bars illustrate the stand...

Spectral profiles of areas of the cerebellum. Clustered power spectra in source space represent normalised power, i.e., spectral power in comparison to the whole brain. Legends show the corresponding duration of each pattern (i.e., the percentage of trials in which each spectrum was present on average during recording). Shaded error bars illustrate...

Spectral profiles of areas of the cerebellar vermis. Clustered power spectra in source space represent normalised power, i.e., spectral power in comparison to the whole brain. Legends show the corresponding duration of each pattern (i.e., the percentage of trials in which each spectrum was present on average during recording). Shaded error bars ill...

The development of action and perception, and their relation in infancy is a central research area in socio-cognitive sciences. In this Perspective Article, we focus on the developmental variability and continuity of action and perception. At group level, these skills have been shown to consistently improve with age. We would like to raise awarenes...

The anticipation of a speaker’s next turn is a key element of successful conversation. This can be achieved using a multitude of cues. In natural conversation, the most important cue for adults to anticipate the end of a turn (and therefore the beginning of the next turn) is the semantic and syntactic content. In addition, prosodic cues, such as in...

Infants and adults frequently observe actions performed jointly by more than one person. Research in action perception, however, has focused largely on actions performed by an individual person. Here, we explore how 9- and 12-month-old infants and adults perceive a block-stacking action performed by either one agent (individual condition) or two ag...

The multiple object tracking (MOT) paradigm is a cognitive task that requires parallel tracking of several identical, moving objects following nongoal-directed, arbitrary motion trajectories. The current study aimed to investigate the employment of prediction processes during MOT. As an indicator for the involvement of prediction processes, we targ...

In observed conversations, auditory and visual cues are used to shift attention towards the current speaker. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether one sensory modality dominates this cueing in prelinguistic and linguistic children and adults. To this end, participants from three age groups (1-year-olds, 3-year-olds and adults) wer...