Temporal integration in the auditory system of locusts was quantified by presenting single clicks and click pairs while performing intracellular recordings. Auditory neurons were studied at three processing stages, which form a feed-forward network in the metathoracic ganglion. Receptor neurons and most first-order interneurons ("local neurons") encode the signal envelope, while second-order in...

Ethological views of brain functioning suggest that sound representations and computations in the auditory neural system are optimized finely to process and discriminate behaviorally relevant acoustic features and sounds (e.g., spectrotemporal modulations in the songs of zebra finches). Here, we show that modeling of neural sound representations in terms of frequency-specific spectrotemporal mo...

Neuroanatomical models hypothesize a role for the dorsal auditory pathway in phonological processing as a feedforward efferent system (Davis and Johnsrude, 2007; Rauschecker and Scott, 2009; Hickok et al., 2011). But the functional organization of the pathway, in terms of time course of interactions between auditory, somatosensory, and motor regions, and the hemispheric lateralization pattern i...

Evidence from functional neuroimaging studies suggests that the auditory cortex can become more responsive to visual and somatosensory stimulation following deafness, and that this occurs predominately in the right hemisphere. Extensive cross-modal plasticity in prospective cochlear implant recipients is correlated with poor speech outcomes following implantation, highlighting the potential imp...

Neural slowing is commonly noted in older adults, with consequences for sensory, motor, and cognitive domains. One of the deleterious effects of neural slowing is impairment of temporal resolution; older adults, therefore, have reduced ability to process the rapid events that characterize speech, especially in noisy environments. Although hearing aids provide increased audibility, they cannot c...

Thresholds of auditory-nerve (AN) fibers and auditory neurons are commonly specified in terms of sound pressure only, implying that they are independent of time. At the perceptual level, however, the sound pressure required for detection decreases with increasing stimulus duration, suggesting that the auditory system integrates sound over time. The quantity commonly believed to be integrated is...

UNLABELLED Temporal resolution is essential to speech acoustic perception. It may be altered in subjects with auditory disorders, thus impairing the development of spoken and written language. AIM The goal was to compare temporal resolution of children with normal hearing, with those bearing conductive hearing loss and auditory processing disorders. MATERIALS AND METHODS The sample had 31 c...

Auditory processing of complex sources, after an initial peripheral spectro-temporal stage, is thought to have a more central stage identify in the output time segments and frequency regions of higher activity by way of a temporal and spectral modulation analysis. Such analysis broadens the view on perception, both that of complex signals and of auditory scene analysis (ASA). When resolution of...

BACKGROUND An outstanding question in sensory neuroscience is whether the perceived timing of events is mediated by a central supra-modal timing mechanism, or multiple modality-specific systems. We use a perceptual learning paradigm to address this question. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Three groups were trained daily for 10 sessions on an auditory, a visual or a combined audiovisual tempor...