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The continuing adventures of cognitive electrophysiologist and computational neuro-musicologist Matt Schalles, Ph.D.
The continuing adventures of cognitive electrophysiologist and computational neuro-musicologist Matt Schalles, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychology - New College of Florida
Visiting Scientist - Carnegie Mellon University Neuroscience Institute
mschalles [at] NCF [dot] edu
mattscha [at] andrew [dot] cmu [dot] edu
Visit my research group, the Comparative Sensorimotor Learning Lab (CSL2) at the intersection of human cognition, comparative neuroscience, and marine biology at New College!
***Announcements***
11/14-19/2025
Presenting a poster at the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego.
Auditory processing and response time in bottlenose dolphins performing a signal detection task: proof of principle neurobehavioral observations.
This is data I collected with the Navy Marine Mammal Program, and analyzed with several of my research students at New College, who are coauthors on the project.
New publication Summer 2025!
More work coming out of APL to help explain just how sound gets from the dolphin jaw to its inner ear.
New publication Summer 2025!
My colleagues at the UW Applied Physics Lab and Aarhus put a lot of work into modeling how a porpoise can use sonar to find a target and ignore distractor objects in the water.
6/15/25
Presenting work at the International Evoked Response Audiometry Study Group in Boulder Colorado. Designing sparse EEG arrays to capture dolphin auditory evoked response.
In collaboration with John Buck, we propose a method that works for any species if you have to sacrifice recording channels, to maximize the information from a subset of known electrodes.
*** Starting Fall 2024 I will join the faculty at New College of Florida working with neuroscience & psychology programs, and collaborating with the Florida Institute for Marine Mammal Science***
4/25/24 - Presenting at the GTEC 2024 Spring School for Brain Computer Interface technology. Exploration of Bottlenose Dolphin Auditory Processing Using ‘High Density’ 16 channel EEG
1/18/24 - Giving a public, general audience talk at the Riverside, IL library What Can Anatomy and Brainwaves Tell Us About Human and Dolphin Hearing
*** Starting Fall 2023 I will take the lead of Aurora University's new neuroscience program as an Asst. Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience***
5/10/23 Giving a talk at the Acoustical Society of America meetings in Chicago. EEG study of attention on an auditory target detection task in dolphins and humans
11/12/22 Presenting a couple posters at the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego. Catch me at the APAN satellite as well!
Prospective electrophysiological correlates of auditory attention in the bottlenose dolphin.
and in collaboration with grad student Alex Pei from CMU, Source localization of dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) click evoked auditory potentials
6/30/22 CMU did a little write up on our grant award.
5/23/22 New Paper!
A chapter of Jessie's dissertation detailing the work that went into her presentation for the Society of Marine Mammology 2021. Lots of very noisy EEG from free swimming/diving animals to clean up with machine learning approaches I helped her learn. Eavesdropping on the brain at sea: development of a surface-mounted system to detect weak electrophysiological signals from wild animals
5/23/22 Giving a talk at the Acoustical Society of America meetings in Denver. Towards auditory stream segregation in Tursiops truncatus. My collaborators Wu-Jung Lee and Bogan Popa are giving keynote, and hot topics presentations, make sure to catch them too!
3/3/22 My team won a 5 year, multi-million dollar grant from the Office of Naval Research: Neurobehavioral, Physiological, and Computational Processes of Auditory Object Learning in Mammals!!!!
In celebration, I asked a generative neural network to help envision experiment participants.
12/13/21 My colleague and mentee Jessica Kendall-Bar is presenting really cool data that was a real challenge not just to collect, but to clean up and analyze. At the Society for Marine Mammalogy: Sleeping while diving: the first recordings of marine mammal sleep in the wild.
8/27/21 New Paper!
- and Editor's pick to boot from the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Yes dolphins have a response similar to the human mismatch negativity! This implies that their brains filter auditory inputs based on expectation/probability of the stimulus occurrence. Auditory oddball responses in Tursiops truncatus.
7/30/21 New paper!
When I joined this field, I was taken back by how little was rigorously tested and standardized in protocols for recording auditory (and other sensory) evoked potentials in dolphins. You can see a summary of just all the different electrode locations and amplifier filter settings historically reported, summarized in a table here. Now out in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A. Measuring auditory cortical responses in Tursiops truncatus
3/23/21
I'm giving a talk at my Alma Matter - Creighton University, at the invitation of their neuroscience club. Would have loved for that club to exist when I was there, but back then there was not even a neuroscience major/program. I cobbled mine together from psychology, biology, and even a few philosophy courses.
This will include material presented at conferences these past couple years, and will also spend time going a bit more in depth into the methods and data collection aspects of working with marine mammals.
***Starting October 2020 I'm promoted to Research Professor in the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University!***
8/12/20
Honored to share my research for the National Marine Mammal Foundation's Scientific Snapshot series. I'm not an employee of the foundation, but I collaborate closely with several foundation scientists and love to participate in their outreach events for audiences from 7-70+ years of age.
This is repackaged work from my previous conference presentations, but aimed at a more broad/general audience
12/2/19
Presenting at the ASA meetings in San Diego: In-air and underwater auditory evoked cortical responses in the dolphin
7/3/2019
Presenting preliminary work at the International Evoked Response Audiometry Study Group in Sydney Australia. Non-invasive Click-Evoked Auditory Cortical Response in the Dolphin
***Starting July 2018 I return to San Diego, with a Boston University appointment, to study auditory perception in marine mammals!***
2/9/18 Giving a talk at the invitation of the Psychology Department at Mills College. All are welcome! Musical Rhythm: A Cross-Species Approach to Perception 12:00-12:45 in NSB 241
1/12/18 New paper! Synchronizing Moving and Listening Behavior with Brainwaves via Rhythmic Hand Drumming. This was a pilot project/novel task that made it into my dissertation. As far as I know, it was the first controlled experiment using repetitive, rhythmic hand drumming as a time-locked behavior for EEG recording and analysis. There is a heartbreak story associated with the publication process, please reach out to me if you want the full story. Here is the preprint of the paper.
8/22/17 Staffing a discussion table for outreach at the Vetspertise Resource Fair at Laney College in Oakland
6/7/17 Staffing a discussion table for outreach at the Veteran Resource and Job Fair in Concord
3/28/17 Presenting Preliminary Analysis of our PTSD and gambling/decision making experiment at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Meetings in SF. view poster pdf here
2/9/17 Come chat with me as I run a brainwave demo table at the California Academy of Science's Night Life for Noise Pop: Science of sound and music
8/01/16
***Our pilot grant collaboration is funded to examine effects of neuro-cognitive training for recovery from head trauma!!!
6/15/16
***My contributions regarding resting state connectivity models in mind wandering helped renew our lab's long term research funding into cognitive and emotional effects of head trauma and post-traumatic stress!
8/20/15
New publication Musical Sequence Learning and EEG Correlates of Audiomotor Processing in a Music and the Brain special issue of Behavioural Neurology!
5/26/15 Volunteering with Oakland Unified School District
3/10/15 Presenting my doctoral work for my new colleagues and whoever wants to come to Martinez!
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