David McAlpine

Jason Mikiel-Hunter

John Rinzel

LR Bernstein

Michiel Remme

NC Singh

Roberta Donato

English

PubMed

Springer - Publisher Connector

POSTER PRESENTATION Open Access
ITD sensitivity to naturalistic sounds in the
superior olivary complex
Michiel Remme1*, Jason Mikiel-Hunter2, Roberta Donato2, John Rinzel1,3, David McAlpine2
From Twentieth Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting: CNS*2011
Stockholm, Sweden. 23-28 July 2011
Neurons in the medial superior olive (MSO) and lateral
superior olive (LSO) of the auditory brainstem code for
sound source location in the horizontal plane by
extracting interaural time differences (ITD) from the
fine structure or envelope of sound stimuli. Both cell
types are tuned to frequency (characteristic frequency,
CF) and are organized along a tonotopic axis.
The statistics of natural sounds vary with frequency,
e.g., the signal to noise ratio of combined behaviorally
relevant and background noise stimuli typically decrease
with increasing frequency [1]. Also, auditory nerve
encoding of sound changes with increasing frequency,
moving from a phase-locking to an envelope coding
strategy.
We studied whether the intrinsic properties of MSO
and LSO cells vary along the tonotopic axis in order to
optimize ITD sensitivity to natural sounds. Using in vitro
whole-cell recordings we characterized the membrane fil-
ters of cells in the guinea pig MSO and LSO with ZAP
current injections. All MSO cells and some of the LSO
cells showed membrane potential resonances with peak
frequencies between 80 and 400 Hz. The experiments
suggest that the peak resonant frequencies decrease
along the tonotopic axis (with increasing CF). Using a
modeling approach we first assessed what membrane
currents could underlie the resonance. Linear models
fitted to the data predict that a gradient in both the den-
sity and activation time constant of a low threshold
potassium current (IKLT) is probably underlying the reso-
nant frequency gradient. We subsequently examined how
the filter gradient affects ITD sensitivity to natural
sounds. Simulations where we fed guinea pig vocaliza-
tions to the neural filters via an auditory nerve model
show that ITD sensitivity increases with the cell’s peak
resonant frequency, also in noisy environments. Hence,
our results suggest that ITD sensitivity decreases along
the tonotopic axis. This finding could underlie the
decreasing performance in ITD discrimination with
increasing CF and amplitude modulation frequency
found in psychophysics [2].
Author details
1Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA.
2Ear Institute, University College London, London, WC1X 8EE, UK. 3Courant
Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, New York, NY
10003, USA.
Published: 18 July 2011
References
1. Singh NC, Theunissen FE: Modulation spectra of natural sounds and
ethological theories of auditory processing. J Acoust Soc Am 2003,
114:3394-3411.
2. Bernstein LR, Trahiotis C: Enhancing sensitivity to interaural delays at high
frequencies by using “transposed stimuli”. J Acoust Soc Am 2002,
112:1026-1036.
doi:10.1186/1471-2202-12-S1-P216
Cite this article as: Remme et al.: ITD sensitivity to naturalistic sounds in
the superior olivary complex. BMC Neuroscience 2011 12(Suppl 1):P216.
Submit your next manuscript to BioMed Central
and take full advantage of: 
• Convenient online submission
• Thorough peer review
• No space constraints or color figure charges
• Immediate publication on acceptance
• Inclusion in PubMed, CAS, Scopus and Google Scholar
• Research which is freely available for redistribution
Submit your manuscript at 
www.biomedcentral.com/submit
* Correspondence: michiel.remme@nyu.edu
1Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA
Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
Remme et al. BMC Neuroscience 2011, 12(Suppl 1):P216
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/12/S1/P216
© 2011 Remme et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in
any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


ITD sensitivity to naturalistic sounds in the superior olivary complex

Rinzel John

Donato Roberta

Mikiel-Hunter Jason

Remme Michiel

McAlpine David

Directory of Open Access Journals

BMC Neuroscience

Crossref

Enhancing sensitivity to interaural delays at high frequencies by using “transposed stimuli”.

FE: Modulation spectra of natural sounds and ethological theories of auditory processing.

http://doaj.org/search?source=%7B%22query%22%3A%7B%22bool%22%3A%7B%22must%22%3A%5B%7B%22term%22%3A%7B%22id%22%3A%22e657af07fa9d44949aa0b5dc2bb4322c%22%7D%7D%5D%7D%7D%7D

ITD sensitivity to naturalistic sounds in the superior olivary complex

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Springer - Publisher Connector

Directory of Open Access Journals

Crossref