Janis H. Zickfeld, Niels van de Ven, Olivia Pich, Thomas W. Schubert, Jana B. Berkessel, José J. Pizarro, Braj Bhushan, Nino Jose Mateo, Sergio Barbosa, Leah Sharman, Gyöngyi Kökönyei, Elke Schrover, Igor Kardum, John Jamir Benzon Aruta, Ljiljana B. Lazarevic, María Josefina Escobar, Marie Stadel, Patrícia Arriaga, Arta Dodaj, Rebecca Shankland, Nadyanna M. Majeed, Yansong Li, Eleimonitria Lekkou, Andree Hartanto, Asil A. Özdoğru, Leigh Ann Vaughn, Maria del Carmen Espinoza, Amparo Caballero, Anouk Kolen, Julie Karsten, Harry Manley, Nao Maeura, Mustafa Eşkisu, Yaniv Shani, Phakkanun Chittham, Diogo Ferreira, Jozef Bavolar, Irina Konova, Wataru Sato, Coby Morvinski, Pilar Carrera, Sergio Villar, Agustin Ibanez, Shlomo Hareli, Adolfo M. Garcia, Inbal Kremer, Friedrich M. Götz, Andreas Schwerdtfeger, Catalina Estrada-Mejia, Masataka Nakayama, Wee Qin Ng, Kristina Sesar, Charles T. Orjiakor, Kitty Dumont, Tara Bulut Allred, Asmir Gračanin, Peter J. Rentfrow, Victoria Schönefeld, Zahir Vally, Krystian Barzykowski, Henna-Riikka Peltola, Anna Tcherkassof, Shamsul Haque, Magdalena Śmieja, Terri Tan Su-May, Hans IJzerman, Argiro Vatakis, Chew Wei Ong, Eunsoo Choi, Sebastian L. Schorch, Darío Páez, Sadia Malik, Pavol Kačmár, Magdalena Bobowik, Paul Jose, Jonna K. Vuoskoski, Nekane Basabe, Uğur Doğan, Tobias Ebert, Yukiko Uchida, Michelle Xue Zheng, Philip Mefoh, René Šebeňa, Franziska A. Stanke, Christine Joy Ballada, Agata Blaut, Yang Wu, Judith K. Daniels, Natália Kocsel, Elif Gizem Demirag Burak, Nina F. Balt, Eric Vanman, Suzanne L.K. Stewart, Bruno Verschuere, Pilleriin Sikka, Jordane Boudesseul, Diogo Martins, Ravit Nussinson, Kenichi Ito, Sari Mentser, Tuğba Seda Çolak, Gonzalo Martinez-Zelaya, Ad Vingerhoets, Tears evoke the intention to offer social support: A systematic investigation of the interpersonal effects of emotional crying across 41 countries, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 95, 2021,104137, ISSN 0022-1031.

René Šebeňa, Stefanie Helmer, Janina Petkeviciene, Andrea Lukacs, Ferdinand Salonna, Oľga Orosová,Rafael Mikolajczyk. Psychometric Evaluation of the Short Self-Regulation Questionnaire across Three European Countries. Studia Psychologica, Vol. 60, No. 1, 2018, 5-15.

Gallun, F. J, Seitz, A., Eddins, D. A., Molis, M. R., Stavropoulos, T., Jakien, K. M., Kampel, S. D., Diedesch, A. C., Hoover, E. C., Bell, K., Souza, P. E., Sherman, M., Calandruccio, L., Xue, G., Taleb, N., Sebena, R., Srinivasan, N. (2018): Development and validation of Portable Automated Rapid Testing (PART) measures for auditory research. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 33:1.

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René Šebeňa. Factors Associated with Alcohol Use in University Students.1. vyd. - Olomouc : Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 2022. - 84 s. - ISBN 9788024462097. 

Project name: ALT – Adaptation, learning and training for spatial hearing in complex environments (EU Horizon 2020 MSCA-RISE-2015 program).

Project Number: 691229

Realization period: 01/01/2016-31/12/2019 (extended co-funding until 12/2020)

Project participation: coinvestigator

Brief characteristics of the project: 

The human ability to understand speech in complex noisy environments is very important. An international consortium led by doc. Norbert Kopčo from Perception and Cognition Laboratory at the UPJŠ Institute of Computer Science recently completed the EU Horizon 2020 project ALT which studied how the brain adapts and learns when coping with such tasks. The project results provide new knowledge about the neural structures and cognitive processes of learning important in many everyday situations, ranging from localizing a ringing phone to identification of new phonemes in a foreign language. Also, tools and brain-training cell phone games were developed aiming at improving the auditory abilities of normal-hearing as well as hearing-impaired listeners. 

Project number: VEGA 1/0355/20, Science Grant Agency of the Slovak Republic. Vedecká grantová agentúra Ministerstva školstva, vedy, výskumu a športu Slovenskej republiky a Slovenskej akadémie vied

Project name: Mechanisms of auditory spatial and attention processing: experiments, oscillations, computational models and analytical methods.

Project realization: 01/01/2020 – 31/12/2022

Project participation: principal investigator

Brief characteristics of the project: 

The proposed project plans to conduct a series of experimental and computational-analytical studies with the aim to study how we use different attention mechanisms to locate sounds in the virtual hearing environment. The project will be assessing the neural activity using electroencephalography and compare it with behavioral performance and predictions of computational models of attention mechanism. During the design proposal, analysis and modeling of observed attention mechanisms, the several advanced computational tools will be developed, based on experimental data. The results will be important, for example, for the development of new prosthetic devices and new virtual reality technologies.

Project ID: DS-2016-0026, (APVV – DS 2016 – EU Danube Region Strategy & The Slovak Research and Development Agency)

Project name: SPACI: Plasticity of spatial processing in normal and cochlear implant hearing

Realization period: 01/01/2017-31/12/2018

Project participation: coinvestigator

Brief characteristics of the project: 

Spatial hearing allows us to localize sound sources, to understand speech in noisy environments, to orient in space, and to enjoy music. Cochlear implants (CIs) and auditory displays (ADs) are prosthetic devices that can dramatically improve the quality of life for people with sensory impairment (the deaf and the blind, respectively). The algorithms implemented in these tools rely heavily on our understanding of auditory processing in electric (cochlear implant) and normal (acoustic) hearing, which is particularly limited in the domain of spatial auditory processing. The goal of the current project is to test several novel hypotheses about the mechanisms of electric and acoustic spatial hearing. Specifically, the current project proposes to perform a series of behavioral studies combined with computational modeling to examine the bottom-up and top-down mechanisms of spatial hearing. Specifically, the perception of interaural time and level differences (important for horizontal sound localization) will be examined, as well as the visually-induced plasticity of relative weighting of these sound localization cues. These results will considerably advance the current understanding of the mechanisms of spatial auditory perception. They have the potential to significantly improve the prosthetic devices for the deaf (CIs), the assistive devices for the blind (ADs), as well as other virtual reality auralization technologies, and biologically-inspired systems for sound localization. Finally, this project will provide a framework for establishing a new collaboration between unique labs in Austria, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, for exchange of young scientists, and for preparation of large collaborative proposals.

Project number: APVV-0253-11 The Slovak Research and Development Agency, Agentúra na podporu výskumu a vývoja Ministerstva školstva, vedy, výskumu a športu Slovenskej republiky

Project ID: Užívanie drog medzi dospievajúcimi a vysokoškolákmi. Na výskumných dátach založená prevencia užívania drog.

Realization period: 07/2012 - 12/2015

Project participation: coinvestigator

Brief characteristics of the project: 

A summary of the findings of the international study SLiCE (Student Life Cohort in Europe), conducted among university students within a longitudinal design, is provided. These findings concern the topic of mediation in prevention of substance use and its exploration by using different types of models and different types of theoretical assumptions as well as methodological and statistical procedures required to test them. It was found that a change in normative beliefs (NB), in terms of an increase, contributes to an increase in risk behavior of university students. Evidence was further found for an indirect influence of a higher level of self-regulation on a lower level of alcohol use through descriptive NB. In particular, students with a higher level of self-regulation and self-determination were found to show a lower increase in alcohol consumption but this was found only among those with a lower increase in descriptive NB. Next, an increase in alcohol consumption was found to be positively related to emotional well-being. However, with an increasing level of reduction in alcohol use increasing differences in emotional well-being were seen but only among those with a higher level of self-regulation. With regard to the role of gender, it was found to moderate the relationship Formulár ZK, strana 3/4 between alcohol use of university students and their social support. More specifically, female university students with a higher level of social support reported a lower alcohol use in which they differed from males, among who a positive association between alcohol use and social support was observed. In addition, a moderated mediation analysis revealed a partial mediating role of resilience in relation to perceived stress and depressive symptoms, however, only among university students with a lower level of social support. Finally, an indirect effect of the Unplugged program was found 3 months after the implementation of this program in relation to lifelong prevalence of smoking among pupils. The mediators of this effect were found to be positive self-esteem and descriptive NB related to the prevalence of smoking among friends. 

https://www.apvv.sk/buxus/docs/zk/zk-apvv-0253-11.pdf

Project number: APVV-0452-12 The Slovak Research and Development Agency, Agentúra na podporu výskumu a vývoja Ministerstva školstva, vedy, výskumu a športu Slovenskej republiky

Project ID: Spatial Attention and Listening in Complex Environments

Realization period:  10/2013-9/2017

Project participation: coinvestigator

Brief characteristics of the project: 

Spatial hearing is important for normal everyday function in humans. It allows us to localize useful and dangerous sounds in the environment and to hear our speech stimuli in complex environments. This proposal aims to study how humans use spatial auditory processing to select and attend to one target in complex multi-talker acoustic environments. Attention is the mechanism that the brain uses to allocate processing resources to various cognitive tasks. In the project, we propose to perform series of behavioral experiments and computational studies to explore how humans use spatial auditory attention (1) to localize a single talker in a multitalker environment, and (2) to process speech of a talker in a multitalker environment. The main goal of the project is to examine how the attention-related sound localization processing interacts with speech perception processing in these tasks. I. e., we will study the extent to which localization is important for guiding attention in speech processing tasks, or vice versa, the extent to which accuracy of auditory localization judgements is conditioned on correct extraction of acoustic features necessary to create speech objects. The results are critical for our understanding of how normal-hearing listeners use spatial perception and attention in complex environments, for the development of prosthetic devices for the hearing impaired, and for the development of virtual reality audio systems.