Ying Huang

Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology | LIN · Special Lab Primate Neurobiology

While it is well established that sensory cortical regions traditionally thought to be unimodal can be activated by stimuli from modalities other than the dominant one, functions of such foreign-modal activations are still not clear. Here we show that visual activations in early auditory cortex can be related to whether or not the monkeys engaged i...

While it is well established that sensory cortical regions traditionally thought to be unimodal can be activated by stimuli from modalities other than the dominant one, functions of such foreign-modal activations are still not clear. Here we show that visual activations in early auditory cortex can be related to whether or not the monkeys engaged i...

Compared to juvenile-onset best vitelliform macular dystrophy (BVMD), adult-onset BVMD is not well characterized and lacks strict diagnostic criteria. The present study aimed to evaluate the clinical and genetic characteristics of four advanced-age Chinese patients with adult-onset BVMD by combining multimodal imaging and genetic analysis. The four...

Background A reliable and effective method is required to deliver agent that can aid the in vivo imaging of retinal vessels. The aim of the present study was to evaluate retro-orbital (RO) injection of fluorescein-labeled isothiocyanate dextran (FITC-dextran) as a method of demonstrating retinal neovascularization (NV) and avascular areas in oxygen...

Behavioral flexibility allows animals to cope with changing situations, for example, to execute different actions to the same stimulus to achieve specific goals in different situations. The selection of the appropriate action in a given situation hinges on the previously learned associations between stimuli, actions, and outcomes. We showed in our...

An individual may need to take different actions to the same stimulus in different situations to achieve a given goal. The selection of the appropriate action hinges on the previously learned associations between stimuli, actions, and outcomes in the situations. Here, using a go/no-go paradigm and a symmetrical reward, we show that early auditory c...

The auditory system needs to fuse the direct wave (lead) from a sound source and its time-delayed reflections (lag) to achieve a single sound image perception. This lead-lag fusion plays crucial roles in auditory processing in reverberant environments. Here, we investigated neural correlates of the lead-lag fusion by tracking human cortical potenti...

Working-memory related neuronal activity identified by between-task comparison.The table shows numbers and percentages (in brackets) of recording sites where the neuronal activity during the final 500 ms of the delay was significantly different in high- and low-WM-load trials with the same S1s (p<0.05, permutation test). Numbers of sites with signi...

Working memory is the cognitive capacity of short-term storage of information for goal-directed behaviors. Where and how this capacity is implemented in the brain are unresolved questions. We show that auditory cortex stores information by persistent changes of neural activity. We separated activity related to working memory from activity related t...

This study shows that ongoing electrical stimulation of the dopaminergic ventral midbrain can modify neuronal activity in the auditory cortex of awake primates for several seconds. This was reflected in a decrease of the spontaneous firing and in a bidirectional modification of the power of auditory evoked potentials. We consider that both effects...

Motivated by the increasing evidence that auditory cortex is under control of dopaminergic cell structures of the ventral midbrain, we studied how the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra affect neuronal activity in auditory cortex. We electrically stimulated 567 deep brain sites in total within and in the vicinity of the two dopaminergic ve...

Objectives: Previous studies have shown that both younger adults and older adults with clinically normal hearing are able to detect a break in correlation (BIC) between interaurally correlated sounds presented over headphones. This ability to detect a BIC improved when the correlated sounds were presented over left and right loudspeakers rather th...

Detecting a transient break in correlation (BIC) between correlated sounds is much easier when presented over two loudspeakers than when presented over two headphones. However, older adults benefit less than younger adults from a change from headphone to loudspeaker presentation (Ear and Hearing, (30) 273-286, 2009), suggesting an age-related reduc...

The purpose of the study was to determine why perceived spatial separation provides a greater release from informational masking in Chinese than English when target sentences in each of the languages are masked by other talkers speaking the same language. Monolingual speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese listened to semantically anomalous senten...

To investigate whether older adults can use voice information to unmask speech. Under a voice-priming condition, before a target-speech sentence was presented with a noise or speech masker, one or two voice-priming sentences were recited with the same voice reciting the target sentence. Eighteen younger adults and 12 older adults with clinically no...

To discriminate and to recognize sound sources in a noisy, reverberant environment, listeners need to perceptually integrate the direct wave with the reflections of each sound source. It has been confirmed that perceptual fusion between direct and reflected waves of a speech sound helps listeners recognize this speech sound in a simulated reverbera...

Perceptual integration of the sound directly emanating from the source with reflections needs both temporal storage and correlation computation of acoustic details. We examined whether the temporal storage is frequency dependent and associated with speech unmasking. In Experiment 1, a break in correlation (BIC) between interaurally correlated wideb...

A measurement of head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) with high spatial resolution was carried out in this study. HRTF measurement is difficult in the proximal region because of the lack of an appropriate acoustic point source. In this paper, a modified spark gap was used as the acoustic sound source. Our evaluation experiments showed that the s...

This study investigated whether interaural integration is affected by introducing an interaural delay. In Experiment 1, both younger adults with normal hearing and older adults in the early stages of presbycusis were able to detect a transient break in interaural correlation (BIC) in the temporal middle of interaurally correlated wideband noises. H...

Human listeners are extraordinarily sensitive to a transient break in interaural correlation (called binaural gap). In this study, a binaural gap embedded in interaurally correlated noise markers elicited marked scalp event-related potentials (ERPs). ERPs to the binaural gap in narrowband noise with the center frequency of 1600 Hz were significantl...

The measurement and structure of a database of distance-dependent head-related transfer function is introduced in this paper. This database was setup by measuring a high spatial resolution head-related transfer function at a total of 6344 space points, with distance from 20 to 160 cm, elevation from -40 to 90 degrees, and azimuth from 0 to 360 degr...

This study evaluated unmasking functions of perceptual integration of target speech and simulated target-speech reflection, which were presented by two spatially separated loudspeakers. In both younger-adult listeners with normal hearing and older-adult listeners in the early stages of presbycusis, reducing the time interval between target speech a...

In cocktail-party environments, familiarity or knowledge of target talker's voice is useful for reducing speech-on-speech masking (Yang et al., Speech Communication, 49, 892-904, 2007). In addition, the onset asynchrony between target speech and masking speech is an effective cue for unmasking target speech. The present study examined whether the v...

When either broadband or narrowband arbitrary noises presented at the two ears are correlated, a fused noise image is perceived inside the head if the interaural interval (interaural time difference, ITD) is sufficiently short, indicating that acoustic-waveform information can be binaurally integrated. At both the perceptual level and neurophysiolo...

When masking speech is present, pre-presentation of early part of nonsense target speech improves recognition of the rest of target speech, indicating a content andor voice priming effect (Freyman et al., 2004; Yang et al., 2007). Here, we examined both the prime-length effect and the prime-position effect on recognition of nonsense target speech w...

Visual speech information, such as lipreading cues, can assist listeners to segregate a target voice from competing voices (Helfer and Freyman, 2005). However, because signals contained in lipreading are multidimensional, it is not clear whether a simple visual cue, such as the light flash that is synchronous to the onset of each syllable in target...

The speech intelligibility index (SII) theory objectively assesses speech intelligibility, and the frequency-importance function (FIF), which reflects the relative importance of various frequency bands to speech intelligibility for various languages, occupies the central part of the theory. However, the FIF has not been examined for tonal Chinese M...

Perceptual integration of the sound wave directly emanating from the source with reflections of the source needs both bridging temporal gaps and calculating correlations between sound waves. In this study, we examined whether the temporal integration of sourcereflection signals is frequency dependent and associated with speech unmasking under simul...

In a reverberant environment where several people talk simultaneously, perceptual grouping of the direct wave emanating from a talker with its reflections is essential for both distinguishing different talkers and identifying attended speech. Older‐adult listeners often feel it difficult to understand attended speech in reverberant environments. In...

Elderly adults experience greater difficulties with sound localization tasks involving the precedence effect (PE) than young adults (Cranford et al., 1990). In this study, the echo threshold of the PE and the threshold for detecting the dynamic change in interaural correlation were investigated in 12 young adults and 8 elderly adults with clinicall...

The amount of release from informational masking in monolingual English (Toronto, Canada), and Chinese (Beijing, China) listeners was measured using the paradigm developed by Freyman et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 106, 3578–3588]. Specifically, psychometric functions relating percent‐correct word recognition to signal‐to‐noise ratio were determined un...

Speech maskers contain both informational‐masking and energetic‐masking components. To fully understand speech masking, it is critical to separate these two types of masking components. This study investigated the effect of the inter‐target‐source delay (ITSD) on intelligibility of speech when both the speech target and masker were presented by eac...

Due to auditory memory, the auditory system is capable of maintaining a detailed representation of arbitrary waveforms for a period of time, so that a broadband noise and its delayed copies can be perceptually fused. This auditory memory would be critical for perceptually grouping correlated sounds and segregating uncorrelated sounds in noisy, reve...