David Poeppel

David Poeppel is Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University (NYU), a researcher who employs behavioral and cognitive neuroscience approaches to study the brain basis of auditory processing, speech perception and language comprehension. In June 2014, Poeppel was appointed a director of the newly established Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt/Main, Germany.[1]

Biography

Poeppel is from Munich, Germany, and received his Abitur from the Maximiliansgymnasium, obtained his bachelor’s degree (1990) and doctorate (1995) from MIT. He received training in functional brain imaging as a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Medicine of the University of California, San Francisco. Before going to NYU in 2009, Poeppel directed the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory at the University of Maryland College Park, where he was a professor of linguistics and biology.

He was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been a guest professor at several institutions. He has received the DaimlerChrysler Berlin Prize and other honors.

Research

The research in Poeppel’s laboratory addresses questions such as: What are the cognitive and neuronal “parts lists” that form the basis for language processing, the fundamental constituents used in speech and language? How is sensory information transformed into the abstract representations that underlie language processing? What are the neural circuits that enable language processing?

Well-known contributions of the Poeppel laboratory include: the functional anatomic model of language developed with Greg Hickok;[2][3][4] research on lateralization in auditory processing;[5][6] and experimental work on the role of neuronal oscillations in audition and speech perception.[7][8] He also writes and lectures about methodological questions at the interdisciplinary boundary between cognitive science research and brain research.[9]

References

  1. ↑ Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics website
  2. ↑ Hickok, G. and Poeppel, D. (2000). "Towards a Functional Anatomy of Speech Perception". Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4:131-138
  3. ↑ Poeppel, D. and Hickok, G. (2004). "Towards a new functional anatomy of language". Cognition 92, 1-12.
  4. ↑ Hickok, G & Poeppel, D. (2007). "The cortical organization of speech processing". Nature Neuroscience Reviews 8: 393-402.
  5. ↑ Poeppel, D. (2003). "The analysis of speech in different temporal integration windows: cerebral lateralization as ‘asymmetric sampling in time’". Speech Communication 41: 245-255.
  6. ↑ Boemio, A., Fromm, S., Braun, A., Poeppel, D. (2005). "Hierarchical and asymmetric temporal sensitivity in human auditory cortices". Nature Neuroscience 8: 389-395.
  7. ↑ Luo, H. and Poeppel, D. (2007). "Phase Patterns of Neuronal Responses Reliably Discriminate Speech in Human Auditory Cortex", Neuron. 54, 1001-1010
  8. ↑ Giraud, AL & Poeppel, D. (2012). "Cortical oscillations and speech processing: emerging computational principles and operations". Nature Neuroscience. 2012 March 18. doi: 10.1038/nn.3063.
  9. ↑ Poeppel, D (2012). "The maps problem and the mapping problem: Two challenges for a cognitive neuroscience of speech and language". Cognitive Neuropsychology. 29(1-2):34-55.