A Unified Mechanism for Spontaneous-Rate and First-Spike Timing in the Auditory Nerve

Recent physiological experiments have provided detailed descriptions of the properties of first-spike latency and variability in auditory cortex and nerve in response to pure tones with different envelopes. The envelopedependence of first-spike timing and precision in auditory cortical neurons appears to reflect properties established in the nerve. First-spike latency properties in individual auditory nerve fibers are strongly correlated with their spontaneous rate (SR). It is shown here that a minimal, plausible model of auditory transduction with two free parameters accurately reproduces the physiological data from the auditory nerve population. The model consists of a simple gain stage, a bandpass filter, a rectifying saturating non-linearity, and a lowpass filter in series. The output of the lowpass filter drives an inhomogeneous Poisson process. The shape of the non-linearity is determined by SR; in physiological terms, this shape depends upon the resting sensitivity of the synaps...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: JCNS
• Authors: B. Suresh Krishna
• Keywords: Auditory Nerve, Auditory Nerve Population, First-spike Latency, JCNS 2002