title: Responses of midbrain auditory neurons in rats to FM and AM tones presented simultaneously.
abstract: Speech and other communication signals contain components of frequency and amplitude modulations (FM, AM) that often occur together. Auditory midbrain (or inferior colliculus, IC) is an important center for coding time-varying features of sounds. It remains unclear how IC neurons respond when FM and AM stimuli are both presented. Here we studied IC neurons in the urethane-anesthetized rats when animals were simultaneously stimulated with FM and AM tones. Of 122 units that were sensitive to the dual stimuli, the responses could be grossly divided into two types: one that resembled the respective responses to FM or AM stimuli presented separately ("simple" sensitivity, 45% of units), and another that appeared markedly different from their respective responses to FM or AM tones ("complex" sensitivity, 55%). These types of combinational sensitivities were further correlated with individual cell's frequency tuning pattern (response area) and with their common response pattern to FM and AM sounds. Results suggested that such combinational sensitivity could reflect local synaptic interactions on IC neurons and that the neural mechanisms could underlie more developed sensitivities to acoustic combinations found at the auditory cortex.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physiology, Medical College, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, Republic of China.
authors.forename: M F
authors.initials: MF
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Edmund C
authors.initials: EC
authors.lastname: So
authors.forename: Paul W F
authors.initials: PW
authors.lastname: Poon
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D000818:Animals; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology; D003056:Cochlear Nerve / Q000502:physiology*; D004594:Electrophysiology / Q000379:methods; D007245:Inferior Colliculi / Q000502:physiology*; D023421:Models, Animal; D011846:Radio Waves; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley; D011984:Sensory Receptor Cells / Q000502:physiology*