openHSU – Research Showcase

Beauty judgments are common in daily life, but rarely studied in cognitive neuroscience. Here, in three studies, we searched for the neural mechanisms of musical beauty using a naturalistic free-listening paradigm applied to behavioral and neuroimaging recordings and validated by experts’ judgments. In Study 1, 30 adults continuously rated the perceived beauty of three musical pieces using a motion sensor. This served to identify the musical passages that were inter-subjectively judged as more or less beautiful (‘beautiful’ vs. ‘not-beautiful’ passages). For identifying the consistent neural determinants of the perception of musical beauty, we utilized these ratings in Study 2, where 36 adults were recorded with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they listened attentively to the same pieces of Study 1. In Study 3, to identify the musicological features characterizing the beautiful and not-beautiful passages of Studies 1–2, we collected post-hoc questionnaires from 12 music-composition experts. Results from Study 2 evidenced focal activity in the orbitofrontal cortex when listening to beautiful passages whereas the not-beautiful passages were associated with bilateral supratemporal activity. Effective connectivity analysis discovered inhibition of auditory activation and neural communication with the right orbitofrontal cortex for listening to beautiful passages vs. intrinsic activation of auditory cortices and decreased coupling to orbitofrontal cortex for not-beautiful passages. Experts’ questionnaires indicated that the beautiful passages were more melodic, calm, sad, slow, tonal, traditional, and simple than the ones rated negatively. In sum, we identified neural and psychological underpinnings of musical beauty, irrespectively of individual taste and listening biography.

Cyber sickness (CS) is considered a major challenge in the use of virtual reality (VR). This impacts the planned implementation of VR in the training of operational forces. The present work aimed to investigate the prevalence and onset of CS during virtually supported military training using head-mounted displays (HMDs) and explore related predictor variables. For this purpose, a quantitative cross-sectional study was conducted in which German soldiers (N = 100) were exposed to an immersive fifteen-minute VR scenario. We measured CS severity, age, heart rate (HR), and skin conductance (SC). Using newly developed categories to classify CS severity, the results showed a small prevalence (4%) of CS in the studied sample. Susceptibility to CS was the only predictor of the occurrence of CS symptoms. Accordingly, the present work provides evidence that CS may play a minor role in affecting virtually supported operational training. At the same time, the easily detectable susceptibility to CS promises rapid detection of vulnerable users. Implications and further research are discussed to detect, control, and mitigate CS.

This work is devoted to creation of a unique laser source for high-precision spectroscopy in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) spectral region, where no continuous wave lasers exist. The optical region contains a vast of intriguing atomic and electron transitions that still need to be investigated, such as an isomeric nuclear transition in 229Th and the 1S-2S transition in trapped He+ ions. Namely, the work focuses on developing a high average and peak power laser system at a multi-megahertz repetition rate, which should drive high harmonics in a noble gas to transfer the optical frequency comb into the short wavelength region. Since the conversion efficiencies in high harmonic generation processes typically do not exceed ~10^-6, a driver should possess high average power and energy in combination with low noise. While high pulse peak power could improve the conversion efficiency, the high average power would ensure reasonable power in the generated XUV comb lines for spectroscopy applications. Thin-disk Kerr-lens mode-locked oscillators were chosen as robust and powerful femtosecond sources possessing high peak and average powers with the proven potential for scalability. In combination with a new approach of nonlinear spectral broadening and pulse compression in Herriott-type multipass cells, the thin-disk oscillators can provide the necessary peak power (>1 GW) in combination with short pulses to efficiently drive high harmonics in gas. The work is divided into two packages. Firstly, a powerful Kerr-lens mode-locked thin-disk oscillator was developed. Thanks to the scalability of this type of oscillators, it was possible to reach the unprecedented output parameters in a few iterative steps. The final version of the oscillator set a world record on output peak power, namely 110 MW, corresponding to 115 fs-long pulses and 202 W average power at a 14 MHz repetition rate. Additionally, it was demonstrated that the scaling of this type of oscillator can be well predicted and realized beyond 100 MW peak powers. The second part of the thesis focused on boosting the pulse peak power of the developed oscillator for subsequent high harmonic generation in gas jets. To achieve this, the oscillator output pulses underwent nonlinear spectral broadening and pulse compression in Herriott-type multipass cells. As a proof of principle, pulse compression was initially demonstrated with a commercial Pharos laser at reduced average power but equivalent to the oscillator peak power. Finally, the approach was transferred to the high peak- and average power oscillator. The 120 fs pulses were compressed in two cascaded multipass cells by a factor of 15 down to 8.0 fs, corresponding to 148 W average power, 0.9 GW pulse peak power with 82% overall throughput. Additionally, a sub-two-cycle operation with the compressed 6.2 fs long pulses was demonstrated. The multipass cells relying on the all-dielectrically coated mirrors and gas as a nonlinear medium proved to be highly suitable as well as scalable for spectral broadening and compression of high average- and peak power Yb-based lasers. Moreover, several proof-of-principle applications of the developed systems were demonstrated. Among them were mid-infrared generation spanning the range of 2 – 20 µm, multiphoton imaging of the biological tissues, and the first experiments on high harmonic generation.

The end of the First World War was a crucial time for nationalist leaders and minority communities across the European continent and beyond. The impact of the post-war spread of self-determination on the redrawing of Eastern European borders and on the claims of colonial independence movements has been extensively researched. By contrast, the international historiography has paid little attention to minority nationalist movements in Western Europe. This article focuses on three regions (Catalonia, Flanders and South Tyrol) that experienced considerable sub-state national mobilization in the interwar period. We aim to understand whether the leaders of Western European minorities and stateless nations shared the same enthusiasm as their anti-colonial and Eastern European counterparts for the new international order that self-determination seemed to foreshadow in the months following the end of the First World War. Because the American President Woodrow Wilson stood out as the most prominent purveyor of the new international legitimacy of self-determination, the article further examines how Western European nationalist movements exploited Wilson's image and advocacy to achieve their own goals. Nationalist forces in Catalonia, Flanders and South Tyrol initially mobilized self-determination and referred to Wilson as a symbol of national liberation, but this instrumentalization of self-determination was not sustained. Large-scale mobilization occurred only in Catalonia, and, even there, it disappeared suddenly in spring 1919. Furthermore, sub-state nationalist movements in Western Europe tended to mobilize self-determination to gain regional autonomy, rather than full independence, thus pursuing internal, not external, self-determination. The willingness of these movements to privilege autonomy over full independence made them more receptive to compromise. Radical forces would become stronger only in the 1930s and largely for reasons not directly connected to the post-war mobilization around self-determination.

DiaData integrates 13 different datasets and presents a large continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) dataset comprising data from individuals with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) across various age groups. The Maindatabase contains CGM measurements of all 1720 subjects. From this, two subsets are extracted: Subdatabase I includes CGM data and demographics of age and sex for 1306 subjects, while Subdatabase II includes CGM and heart rate data for a subset of 51 subjects.

It has been demonstrated that vowel information can be extracted from speech sounds without attention focused on them, despite widely varying non-speech acoustic information in the input. The present study tested whether even complex tones that were constructed based on F0, F1 and F2 vowel frequencies to resemble the defining features of speech sounds, but were not speech, are categorized pre-attentively according to vowel space information. The Mismatch Negativity brain response was elicited by infrequent tokens of the complex tones, showing that the auditory system can pre-attentively categorize speech information on the basis of the minimal, defining auditory features. The human mind extracts the language-relevant information from complex tones despite the non-relevant variation in the sound input. (© 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Picture naming is a widely used technique in psycholinguistic studies. Here, we describe new on-line resources that our project has compiled and made available to researchers on the world wide web at http://crl.ucsd.edu/~aszekely/ipnp/. The website provides access to a wide range of picture stimuli and related norms in seven languages. Picture naming norms, including indices of name agreement and latency, for 520 black-and-white drawings of common objects and 275 concrete transitive and intransitive actions are presented. Norms for age-of-acquisition, word-frequency, familiarity, goodness-of-depiction, and visual complexity are included. An on-line database query system can be used to select a specific range of stimuli, based on parameters of interest for a wide range of studies on healthy and clinical populations, as well as studies of language development. (© 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Understanding speech requires the construction of phonetic representations while abstracting from specific sound features. To understand different speakers of varying pitches of voice, loudness, or timbre, categorical phoneme information needs to be rapidly extracted from dynamic, changing speech input. The present study demonstrated a genuine MMN to tokens of /a/ and /i/ vowels varying in pitch of voice and amplitude envelope when they occurred infrequently among the respective other vowels. These data indicate that the speech perception system pre‐attentively extracted the F1/F2 formant information despite the language‐irrelevant variation in the sound input.