Dataset Information

Effects of reverberation on the directional sensitivity of auditory neurons across the tonotopic axis: influences of interaural time and level differences.

ABSTRACT: In reverberant environments, acoustic reflections interfere with the direct sound arriving at a listener's ears, distorting the binaural cues for sound localization. We investigated the effects of reverberation on the directional sensitivity of single neurons in the inferior colliculus (IC) of unanesthetized rabbits. We find that reverberation degrades the directional sensitivity of single neurons, although the amount of degradation depends on the characteristic frequency (CF) and the type of binaural cues available. When interaural time differences (ITDs) are the only available directional cue, low-CF cells sensitive to ITDs in the waveform fine time structure maintain better directional sensitivity in reverberation than high-CF cells sensitive to ITDs in the envelope induced by cochlear filtering. Conversely, when both ITD and interaural level difference (ILD) cues are available, directional sensitivity in reverberation is comparable throughout the tonotopic axis of the IC. This result suggests that, at high frequencies, ILDs provide better directional information than envelope ITDs, emphasizing the importance of the ILD-processing pathway for sound localization in reverberation.

SUBMITTER: Devore S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2896784 | biostudies-other | 2010 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Effects of reverberation on the directional sensitivity of auditory neurons across the tonotopic axis: influences of interaural time and level differences.

Devore Sasha S Delgutte Bertrand B

The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 20100601 23

In reverberant environments, acoustic reflections interfere with the direct sound arriving at a listener's ears, distorting the binaural cues for sound localization. We investigated the effects of reverberation on the directional sensitivity of single neurons in the inferior colliculus (IC) of unanesthetized rabbits. We find that reverberation degrades the directional sensitivity of single neurons, although the amount of degradation depends on the characteristic frequency (CF) and the type of bi ...[more]

PMID: 20534831

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Project description:While motion is important for parsing a complex auditory scene into perceptual objects, how it is encoded in the auditory system is unclear. Perceptual studies suggest that the ability to identify the direction of motion is limited by the duration of the moving sound, yet we can detect changes in interaural differences at even shorter durations. To understand the source of these distinct temporal limits, we recorded from single units in the inferior colliculus (IC) of unanesthetized rabbits in response to noise stimuli containing a brief segment with linearly time-varying interaural time difference ("ITD sweep") temporally embedded in interaurally uncorrelated noise. We also tested the ability of human listeners to either detect the ITD sweeps or identify the motion direction. Using a point-process model to separate the contributions of stimulus dependence and spiking history to single-neuron responses, we found that the neurons respond primarily by following the instantaneous ITD rather than exhibiting true direction selectivity. Furthermore, using an optimal classifier to decode the single-neuron responses, we found that neural threshold durations of ITD sweeps for both direction identification and detection overlapped with human threshold durations even though the average response of the neurons could track the instantaneous ITD beyond psychophysical limits. Our results suggest that the IC does not explicitly encode motion direction, but internal neural noise may limit the speed at which we can identify the direction of motion.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Recognizing motion and identifying an object's trajectory are important for parsing a complex auditory scene, but how we do so is unclear. We show that neurons in the auditory midbrain do not exhibit direction selectivity as found in the visual system but instead follow the trajectory of the motion in their temporal firing patterns. Our results suggest that the inherent variability in neural firings may limit our ability to identify motion direction at short durations.

Project description:Sensitivity to changes in the interaural correlation of 50-ms bursts of narrowband or broadband noise was measured in single neurons in the inferior colliculus of urethane-anaesthetized guinea pigs. Rate vs. interaural correlation functions (rICFs) were measured using two methods. These methods compensated in different ways for the inherent variance in interaural correlation between tokens with the same expected correlation. The shape of all rICFs could be best described by power functions allowing them to be summarized by two parameters. Most rICFs were best fit by a power below 2, indicating that they were only slightly nonlinear. However, there were a few fitted functions that had a power of 3-6, indicating marked curvature. Modeling results indicate that the nonlinearity of the majority of rICFs was explicable in terms of the monaural transduction stages; however, some of the rICFs with power greater than 2 require either multiple inputs to the coincidence detector or additional nonlinearities to be included in the model. Discrimination thresholds were estimated at reference correlations of -1, 0, and +1 using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis of the spike-count distribution at each correlation. Thresholds spanned the full possible range, from a minimum of 0.1 to the maximum possible of 2. Thresholds were generally highest with a reference correlation of -1, intermediate with a reference of 0, and lowest with a reference correlation of +1. Thresholds were lowest for the most steeply sloped rICFs, but thresholds were not strongly correlated to the spike rate variance. The lowest thresholds occurred using narrowband noise that was compensated for internal delays, but they were still about three times larger than human psychophysical thresholds measured using similar stimuli. The data suggest that, unlike pure tone interaural time difference, discrimination of a population measure is required to account for behavioral interaural correlation discrimination performance.

Dataset Information

Effects of reverberation on the directional sensitivity of auditory neurons across the tonotopic axis: influences of interaural time and level differences.

Publications

Effects of reverberation on the directional sensitivity of auditory neurons across the tonotopic axis: influences of interaural time and level differences.

Similar Datasets

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