Scholars@Duke
Tobias Overath

Tobias Overath

Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Psychology & Neuroscience
t.overath@duke.edu
90999, Durham, NC 27708
308 Research Drive, LSRC Room B248A, Duke University, Box 90999, Durham, NC 27708

Scholarly Works - Journal articles

Using non-invasive brain stimulation to promote auditory neuroplasticity in the setting of hearing intervention: A scoping review.

Journal article Hear Res · April 2026 Cochlear implants (CI) have revolutionized our ability to treat severe sensorineural hearing loss (HL), yet there is substantial variability in speech perception outcomes. This may be due, in part, to the central nervous system's (CNS) response to HL, whic ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Exploring phonological complexity in statistical learning of artificial words.

Journal article PloS one · January 2026 PurposeThis study examined whether phonological complexity enhances auditory word learning within a statistical learning framework. Specifically, we tested if exposure to phonologically complex speech patterns (i.e., marked consonant clusters) fac ... Full text Cite

Prognostic significance of the QuickSIN score for future hearing threshold deterioration.

Journal article Scientific reports · July 2025 About 10% of audiology patients who experience hearing difficulties in noise have clinically normal hearing thresholds in quiet. While it has been suggested that hearing difficulties in noise might be a precursor for the subsequent development of clinical ... Full text Open Access Cite

Linguistic modulation of the neural encoding of phonemes.

Journal article Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · April 2024 Speech comprehension entails the neural mapping of the acoustic speech signal onto learned linguistic units. This acousto-linguistic transformation is bi-directional, whereby higher-level linguistic processes (e.g. semantics) modulate the acoustic analysis ... Full text Cite

Hidden hearing loss: Fifteen years at a glance.

Journal article Hearing research · March 2024 Hearing loss affects approximately 18% of the population worldwide. Hearing difficulties in noisy environments without accompanying audiometric threshold shifts likely affect an even larger percentage of the global population. One of the potential causes o ... Full text Cite

Quantifying the Impact of Auditory Deafferentation on Speech Perception.

Journal article Trends in hearing · January 2024 The past decade has seen a wealth of research dedicated to determining which and how morphological changes in the auditory periphery contribute to people experiencing hearing difficulties in noise despite having clinically normal audiometric thresholds in ... Full text Cite

MEG correlates of temporal regularity relevant to pitch perception in human auditory cortex.

Journal article NeuroImage · April 2022 We recorded neural responses in human participants to three types of pitch-evoking regular stimuli at rates below and above the lower limit of pitch using magnetoencephalography (MEG). These bandpass filtered (1-4 kHz) stimuli were harmonic complex tones ( ... Full text Cite

Dynamics underlying auditory-object-boundary detection in primary auditory cortex.

Journal article The European journal of neuroscience · November 2021 Auditory object analysis requires the fundamental perceptual process of detecting boundaries between auditory objects. However, the dynamics underlying the identification of discontinuities at object boundaries are not well understood. Here, we employed a ... Full text Cite

An Objective Approach Toward Understanding Auditory Processing Disorder.

Journal article American journal of audiology · September 2021 Purpose In the field of audiology, auditory processing disorder (APD) continues to be a topic of ongoing debate for clinicians and scientists alike, both in terms of theory and clinical practice. In the current viewpoint, we first lay out the main issues t ... Full text Cite

From acoustic to linguistic analysis of temporal speech structure: Acousto-linguistic transformation during speech perception using speech quilts.

Journal article NeuroImage · July 2021 Speech perception entails the mapping of the acoustic waveform to linguistic representations. For this transformation to succeed, the speech signal needs to be tracked over various temporal windows at high temporal precision in order to decode linguistic u ... Full text Cite

An Analytical Framework of Tonal and Rhythmic Hierarchy in Natural Music Using the Multivariate Temporal Response Function.

Journal article Frontiers in neuroscience · January 2021 Even without formal training, humans experience a wide range of emotions in response to changes in musical features, such as tonality and rhythm, during music listening. While many studies have investigated how isolated elements of tonal and rhythmic prope ... Full text Cite

Modulation change detection in human auditory cortex: Evidence for asymmetric, non-linear edge detection.

Journal article The European journal of neuroscience · July 2020 Changes in modulation rate are important cues for parsing acoustic signals, such as speech. We parametrically controlled modulation rate via the correlation coefficient (r) of amplitude spectra across fixed frequency channels between adjacent time frames: ... Full text Cite

The distribution and nature of responses to broadband sounds associated with pitch in the macaque auditory cortex.

Journal article Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · November 2019 The organisation of pitch-perception mechanisms in the primate cortex is controversial, in that divergent results have been obtained, ranging from a single circumscribed 'pitch centre' to systems widely distributed across auditory cortex. Possible reasons ... Full text Cite

The neural processing of phonemes is shaped by linguistic analysis

Journal article Proceedings of the International Symposium on Auditory and Audiological Research · November 1, 2018 Open Access Link to item Cite

The cortical analysis of speech-specific temporal structure revealed by responses to sound quilts.

Journal article Nature neuroscience · June 2015 Speech contains temporal structure that the brain must analyze to enable linguistic processing. To investigate the neural basis of this analysis, we used sound quilts, stimuli constructed by shuffling segments of a natural sound, approximately preserving i ... Full text Cite

Sensitivity to temporal modulation rate and spectral bandwidth in the human auditory system: fMRI evidence.

Journal article Journal of neurophysiology · April 2012 Hierarchical models of auditory processing often posit that optimal stimuli, i.e., those eliciting a maximal neural response, will increase in bandwidth and decrease in modulation rate as one ascends the auditory neuraxis. Here, we tested how bandwidth and ... Full text Cite

Gamma band pitch responses in human auditory cortex measured with magnetoencephalography.

Journal article NeuroImage · January 2012 We have previously used direct electrode recordings in two human subjects to identify neural correlates of the perception of pitch (Griffiths, Kumar, Sedley et al., Direct recordings of pitch responses from human auditory cortex, Curr. Biol. 22 (2010), pp. ... Full text Cite

Cortical mechanisms for the segregation and representation of acoustic textures.

Journal article The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · February 2010 Auditory object analysis requires two fundamental perceptual processes: the definition of the boundaries between objects, and the abstraction and maintenance of an object's characteristic features. Although it is intuitive to assume that the detection of t ... Full text Cite

Encoding of spectral correlation over time in auditory cortex.

Journal article The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · December 2008 Natural sounds contain multiple spectral components that vary over time. The degree of variation can be characterized in terms of correlation between successive time frames of the spectrum, or as a time window within which any two frames show a minimum deg ... Full text Cite

fMRI evidence for a cortical hierarchy of pitch pattern processing.

Journal article PloS one · January 2008 Pitch patterns, such as melodies, consist of two levels of structure: a global level, comprising the pattern of ups and downs, or contour; and a local level, comprising the precise intervals that make up this contour. An influential neuropsychological mode ... Full text Cite

An information theoretic characterisation of auditory encoding.

Journal article PLoS biology · October 2007 The entropy metric derived from information theory provides a means to quantify the amount of information transmitted in acoustic streams like speech or music. By systematically varying the entropy of pitch sequences, we sought brain areas where neural act ... Full text Cite

An information theoretic characterisation of auditory encoding.

Journal article PLoS biology · 2007 The entropy metric derived from information theory provides a means to quantify the amount of information transmitted in acoustic streams like speech or music. By systematically varying the entropy of pitch sequences, we sought brain areas where neural act ... Full text Cite