The binaural interaction component (BIC) of the auditory brainstem response (ABR) and BIC of the frequency-following response (FFR) to tonal stimuli were studied in normal-hearing adults. The ABR and BIC latencies from all subjects were consistently shorter to the click-like sound than to the 2.0 kHz tone burst. Increasing stimulus presentation rate produced longer latencies and diminished ampl...

How does context affect basic processes of sensory integration and the implicit psychophysical scales that underlie those processes? Five experiments examined how stimulus range and response regression determine characteristics of (a) psychophysical scales for loudness and (b) 3 kinds of intensity summation: binaural loudness summation, summation of loudness between tones widely spaced in frequ...

When a pair of monaural pure tones, A and B, are repeatedly alternated in one ear, with noise bursts presented in synchrony with B in the other ear, the noise sometimes delateralizes B. This is presumably a case of Warren and Bashford's (1976) contralateral induction effect. However, the present experiment shows that the degree of contralateral induction is proportional to the separation in fre...

GALAMBOS, ROBERT,JOHANN SCHWARTZKOPFF AND ALLEN RUPERT. Microelectrode study of superior olivary nuclei. Am. J. Physiol. 1 g7(3) : 527-536. I g5g.--The superior olivary nucleus of barbiturate anesthetized cats was explored with microelectrodes. Both slow wave and single unit activity was recorded to clicks, tones and noise delivered to the two ears. The several segments of the superior olivary ...

Extracellular recordings of responses to tone-burst stimulation were used to determine the tonotopic organization of n. magnocellularis (NM) and n. laminaris (NL) in hatching chickens. NM cells show "primary-like" response patterns to ipsilateral stimulation, and are arranged in dorso-ventral isofrequency columns. Units responding to the highest frequency tones (about 4,100 Hz) are situated at ...

BACKGROUND The Mismatch Negativity (MMN) is an event-related potential (ERP) sensitive to early auditory deviance detection and has been shown to be reduced in schizophrenia patients. Moreover, MMN amplitude reduction to duration deviant tones was found to be related to functional outcomes particularly, to neuropsychological (working memory and verbal domains) and psychosocial measures. While M...

Loud sounds damage the cochlea, the auditory receptor organ, reducing hearing sensitivity. Previous studies demonstrate that the centrifugal olivocochlear pathways can moderately reduce these temporary threshold shifts (TTSs), protecting the cochlea. This effect involves only the olivocochlear pathway component known as the crossed medial olivocochlear system pathway, originating from the contr...

Temporal cues, including sound duration, are important for sound identification. Neurons tuned to the duration of pure tones were first discovered in the auditory system of frogs and bats and were discussed as specific adaptations in these animals. More recently duration sensitivity has also been described in the chinchilla midbrain and the cat auditory cortex, indicating that it might be a mor...

Aging is often accompanied by hearing loss, which impacts how sounds are processed and represented along the ascending auditory pathways and within the auditory cortices. Here, we assess the impact of mild binaural hearing loss on the older adults' ability to both process complex sounds embedded in noise and to segregate a mistuned harmonic in an otherwise periodic stimulus. We measured auditor...

The ventral nucleus of the lateral lemniscus (VNLL) is implicated in processing monaural sounds, because its neurons receive input chiefly from the contralateral cochlear nucleus. However, we demonstrate here that a region of the VNLL contains a distinct population of neurons that process binaural sounds and are sensitive to interaural temporal disparities (ITDs). Responses of single neurons we...