Ulrich Pomper

University of Vienna | UniWien · Fakultät für Psychologie

In normal-hearing listeners, localization of auditory speech involves stimulus processing in the postero-dorsal pathway of the auditory system. In quiet environments, bilateral cochlear implant (CI) users show high speech recognition performance, but localization of auditory speech is poor, especially when discriminating stimuli from the same hemif...

When viewing the needle of a syringe approaching your skin, anticipation of a painful prick may lead to increased arousal. How this anticipation is reflected in neural oscillatory activity and how it relates to activity within the autonomic nervous system is thus far unknown. Recently, we found that viewing needle pricks compared with Q-tip touches...

In our environment, acute pain is often accompanied by input from other sensory modalities, like visual stimuli, which can facilitate pain processing. To date, it is not well understood how these inputs influence the perception and processing of pain. Previous studies on integrative processing between sensory modalities other than pain have shown t...

Multistable visual perception refers to phenomena, in which one invariant stimulus pattern is perceived in at least two different, mutually exclusive ways. In this EEG study we differentiate between perceptual- and motor-related processes during perceptual reversals. Delta- and alpha-band activity was analyzed while participants answered to a perce...

Switching attention between or within tasks is part of the implementation and maintenance of executive control processes and plays an indispensable role in our daily lives: It allows us to perform on distinct tasks and with variable objects, enabling us to adapt to and respond in dynamically changing environments. Here, we tested if yoga could bene...

Estimating the location of a stimulus is a key function in sensory processing, and widely considered to result from the integration of prior information and sensory input according to Bayesian principles. A deviation of sensory input from the prior elicits surprisal, depending on the uncertainty of the prior. While this mechanism is increasingly un...

Understanding conditions optimal for attention switching is of utmost importance. Switching attention between tasks or within tasks is part of the implementation and maintenance of executive control processes and plays an indispensable role in our daily lives: It allows us to perform on distinct tasks and with variable objects, enabling them to ada...

We investigated the role of alpha in the suppression of attention capture by salient but to-be-suppressed (negative and nonpredictive) color cues, expecting a potential boosting effect of alpha-rhythmic entrainment on feature-specific cue suppression. We did so by presenting a rhythmically flickering visual bar of 10 Hz before the cue - either on t...

Listeners often operate in complex acoustic environments, consisting of many concurrent sounds. Accurately encoding and maintaining such auditory objects in short-term memory is crucial for communication and scene analysis. Yet, the neural underpinnings of successful auditory short-term memory (ASTM) performance are currently not well understood. T...

Listeners often operate in complex acoustic environments, consisting of many concurrent sounds. Accurately encoding and maintaining such auditory objects in short-term memory is crucial for communication and scene analysis. Yet, the neural underpinnings of successful auditory short-term memory (ASTM) performance are currently not well understood. T...

As part of a larger study investigating if hatha yoga has an effect on executive functions, here, we were interested in whether an eight-week yoga intervention can significantly reduce stress and anxiety, and foster distractor suppression. We also looked for potential relations between these two (as proposed by attentional control theory), but foun...

Engaging in yoga may mitigate stress and anxiety in individuals. It can also potentially enhance one's capacity to manage distractions. Our research aimed to explore the relation between these two outcomes: Can an eight-week yoga program foster distraction suppression, thereby reducing stress and discomfort? To answer this question, we used Hatha Y...

Temporal patterns in our environment provide a rich source of information, to which endogenous neural processes linked to perception and attention can synchronize. This phenomenon, known as entrainment, has so far been studied predominately in the visual and auditory domains. It is currently unknown whether sensory phase-entrainment generalizes to...

Temporal regularities are ubiquitous in our environment. The theory of entrainment posits that the brain can utilize these regularities by synchronizing neural activity with external events, thereby, aligning moments of high neural excitability with expected upcoming stimuli and facilitating perception. Despite numerous accounts reporting entrainme...

Stimulus-driven and top-down dependent capture of attention can be observed under very similar conditions, raising the question of the decisive factors for whether one or the other effect is seen. In the current study, we tested the role of temporal selectivity. Studies showing less evidence of stimulus-driven attention by salient color singletons...

Recently, numerous studies have revealed 4-12 Hz fluctuations of behavioral performance in a multitude of tasks. The majority has utilized stimuli near detection threshold and observed related fluctuations in hit-rates, attributing these to perceptual or attentional processes. As neural oscillations in the 8-20 Hz range also feature prominently in...

Using visual entrainment, we found limited evidence for alpha oscillations' impact in modulating suppression. There was no evidence for a feature-specific boosting role of alpha, and a small feature-unspecific effect of entrainment. Our findings are in line with current theories about alpha's role as perceptual gatekeeper, but more research is need...

Several recent behavioral studies have observed 4–10 Hz rhythmic fluctuations in attention-related performance over time. So far, this rhythmic attentional sampling has predominantly been demonstrated with regards to external visual attention, directed toward one single feature dimension. Whether and how attention might sample from concurrent inter...

Representations held in working memory are crucial in guiding human attention in a goal-directed fashion. Currently, it is debated whether only a single representation or several of these representations can be active and bias behavior at any given moment. In the present study, 25 university students performed a behavioral dense-sampling experiment...

In the current review, we argue that experimental results usually interpreted as evidence for cognitive resource limitations could also reflect functional necessities of human information processing. First, we point out that selective processing of only specific features, objects, or locations at each moment in time allows humans to monitor the suc...

From auditory perception to general cognition, the ability to play a musical instrument has been associated with skills both related and unrelated to music. However, it is unclear if these effects are bound to the specific characteristics of musical instrument training, as little attention has been paid to other populations whose auditory expertise...

Theoretical Background: Uncertainty with respect to professional prospects, a challenging work-life-balance and health problems as well as moderate to high work satisfaction are associated with being a young scientist. This paper aims to investigate the working conditions, job satisfaction, and strain of early stage researchers working in the field...

Zusammenfassung. Unsichere Berufsaussichten, Schwierigkeiten hinsichtlich der Work-Life-Balance und gesundheitliche Probleme werden ebenso wie eine mittlere bis hohe Arbeitszufriedenheit mit der Tätigkeit von Jungwissenschaftler_innen (JuWis) assoziiert. Da zur Situation von JuWis, die im Fach Psychologie in Österreich tätig sind, bisher keine syst...

Sounds in our environment can easily capture human visual attention. Previous studies have investigated the impact of spatially localized, brief sounds on concurrent visuospatial attention. However, little is known on how the presence of a continuous, lateralized auditory stimulus (e.g., a person talking next to you while driving a car) impacts vis...

Human listeners exhibit marked sensitivity to familiar music, perhaps most readily revealed by popular “name that tune” games, in which listeners often succeed in recognizing a familiar song based on extremely brief presentation. In this work, we used electroencephalography (EEG) and pupillometry to reveal the temporal signatures of the brain proce...

In everyday life, we constantly need to remember the temporal sequence of visual events over short periods of time, for example, when making sense of others’ actions or watching a movie. While there is increasing knowledge available on neural mechanisms underlying visual working memory (VWM) regarding the identity and spatial location of objects, l...

When listening to music, we are able to identify well-known songs as familiar within fractions of a second. However, as of now it is unclear how fast the brain can differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar music, and what the underlying neural correlates are. Here, we used electro-encephalography (EEG) and pupillometry to reveal the temporal si...

We investigated the origin of attention capture in the contingent-capture protocol during a search for two colors. When searching for the target color, cues similar to the target capture attention but cues dissimilar to the target do not capture attention. The results are typically explained by top-down contingent capture, a form of proactive contr...

Subjective experience suggests that we are able to direct our auditory attention independent of our visual gaze, e.g when shadowing a nearby conversation at a cocktail party. But what are the consequences at the behavioural and neural level? While numerous studies have investigated both auditory attention and visual gaze independently, little is kn...

Intersensory attention (IA) describes the process of directing attention to a specific modality. Temporal orienting (TO) characterizes directing attention to a specific moment in time. Previously, studies indicated that these two processes could have opposite effects on early evoked brain activity. The exact time-course and processing stages of bot...

Subjective experience suggests that we are able to direct our auditory attention independent of our visual gaze, e.g when shadowing a nearby conversation at a cocktail party. But what are the consequences at the behavioural and neural level? While numerous studies have investigated both auditory attention and visual gaze independently, little is kn...

Knowledge about the sensory modality in which a forthcoming event might occur permits anticipatory intersensory attention. Information as to when exactly an event occurs enables temporal orienting. Intersensory and temporal attention mechanisms are often deployed simultaneously, but as yet it is unknown whether these processes operate interactively...

Oszillationen sind ein allgegenwärtiges Phänomen neuronaler Aktivität. Der Beta Band Frequenzbereich (13-30 Hz, BBA) wurde ursprünglich vor allem mit motorischen und somatosensorischen Prozessen assoziiert. Erst jüngst schreibt man diesem auch komplexe Funktionen in selektiver Aufmerksamkeit und neuronaler Integration zu. Die vorliegende Arbeit hat...

Many electronic devices that we use in our daily lives provide inputs that need to be processed and integrated by our senses. For instance, ringing, vibrating, and flashing indicate incoming calls and messages in smartphones. Whether the presentation of multiple smartphone stimuli simultaneously provides an advantage over the processing of the same...

Synchronized oscillations are important for successful neuronal communication during multisensory processing [1]. Behavioral studies have suggested abnormal multisensory integration in individuals with schizophrenia. Moreover, neurophysiologic studies showed impaired neuronal communication during the processing of unisensory stimuli. Here, we addre...