Katharina S. Rufener

Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg · Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy

Developmental dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by the pathologically diminished ability to successfully acquire reading and writing skills. Altered cortical activation in the auditory cortex, resulting in inaccurate perception of acoustic information, is thought to provide the neurophysiological basis for impaired phonologica...

Interventions in developmental dyslexia typically consist of orthography-based reading and writing trainings. However, their efficacy is limited and, consequently, the symptoms persist into adulthood. Critical for this lack of efficacy is the still ongoing debate about the core deficit in dyslexia and its underlying neurobiological causes. There is...

Most acoustic events in our environment do not appear randomly but are rather predictable due to the temporal regularity in that they occur. Besides sensory-related cortical areas, the cerebellum has been suggested as a key structure in temporal processing and in the anticipation of future events. Hence, patients with cerebellum lesions show impair...

Background One key mechanism thought to underlie speech processing is the alignment of cortical brain rhythms to the acoustic input, a mechanism termed entrainment. Recent work showed that transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) in speech relevant frequencies or adapted to the speech envelope can in fact enhance speech processing. However, it is...

It has been demonstrated that, while otherwise detrimental, noise can improve sensory perception under optimal conditions. The mechanism underlying this improvement is stochastic resonance. An inverted U-shaped relationship between noise level and task performance is considered as the signature of stochastic resonance. Previous studies have propose...

Background: About 10% of the western population suffers from a specific disability in the acquisition of reading and writing skills, known as developmental dyslexia (DD). Even though DD starts in childhood it frequently continuous throughout lifetime. Impaired processing of acoustic features at the phonematic scale based on dysfunctional auditory...

Transcranial electrical stimulation (TES) has been considered a promising tool for improving working memory (WM) performance. Recent studies have demonstrated modulation of networks underpinning WM processing through application of transcranial alternating current (TACS) as well as direct current (TDCS) stimulation. Differences between study design...

Theoretical background Developmental dyslexia (DD) refers to the pathological impairment in the acquisition of reading and/or writing skills that is not accounted for by biological age, intelligence or inadequate schooling (WHO, 2011). It is hypothesized that DD relies, at least in part, on the impaired ability to shift attention to relevant inform...

Selective attention is a basic process required to maintain goal‐directed behavior by appropriately responding to target stimuli and suppressing reactions to non‐target stimuli. It has been proposed that auditory selective attention is linked to the activity of the locus coeruleus‐norepinergic (LC‐NE) system and a large‐scale fronto‐parietal cortic...

Fatigue is one of the most common and debilitating symptoms affecting patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). Sustained cognitive effort induces cognitive fatigue, operationalized as subjective exhaustion and fatigue-related objective alertness decrements with time-on-task. During prolonged cognitive testing, MS patients show increased simple reacti...

Theoretical background Decoding acoustic speech signals requires to parse the acoustic stream into linguistically meaningful units, and to extract stress and prosody. Accordingly, the temporal and spectral resolution of the auditory cortex is essential in successful speech processing (Rosen, 1992). The reduced acuity in discriminating these feature...

Neural oscillations in the gamma range are the dominant rhythmic activation pattern in the human auditory cortex. These gamma oscillations are functionally relevant for the processing of rapidly changing acoustic information in both speech and non-speech sounds. Accordingly, there is a tight link between the temporal resolution ability of the audit...

Introduction The impaired processing of rapidly changing auditory temporal features has been suggested as one key factor in development dyslexia. Voice onset time (VOT), a short period between the release of closure and the start of voicing enables to distinguish categorically between voiced (i.e./da/) and voiceless stop-consonants (i.e./ta/). VOT...

This EEG-study aims to investigate age-related differences in the neural oscillation patterns during the processing of temporally modulated speech. Viewing from a lifespan perspective, we recorded the electroencephalogram (EEG) data of three age samples: young adults, middle-aged adults and older adults. Stimuli consisted of temporally degraded sen...

Transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) has become a valuable research tool for the investigation of neurophysiological processes underlying human action and cognition. In recent years, striking evidence for the neuromodulatory effects of transcranial direct current stimulation, transcranial alternating current stimulation, and transcranial rando...

Healthy aging is typically associated with impairment in various cognitive abilities such as memory, selective attention or executive functions. Less well observed is the fact that also language functions in general and speech processing in particular seems to be affected by age. This impairment is partly caused by pathologies of the peripheral aud...