title: Spike timing in auditory-nerve fibers during spontaneous activity and phase locking.
abstract: In vertebrates, all acoustic information transmitted from the inner ear to the central auditory system is relayed by primary auditory afferents (auditory-nerve fibers; ANFs). These neurons are also the most peripheral elements to use action potentials (spikes) to encode the acoustic information. Here, we review what is known about the spiking of ANFs during spontaneous activity, when spike timing might be regarded as largely random, and during stimulation by low-frequency sounds, when spikes are phase locked to the stimulus waveform, a phenomenon generally considered a hallmark of temporal precision and speed in the auditory system. We focus on mammals, in which each ANF is driven by a single ribbon synapse in a single receptor cell, but also cover relevant research on ANFs of vertebrates from other classes. For spontaneous activity, we highlight several spike-history effects in interspike interval distributions, hazard-rate functions, serial interval correlations, and spike-count statistics. We also review models that have attempted to account for these properties. For phase locking, we focus on the responses to low-frequency tones, rather than to low-frequency components of broadband signals such as noise or clicks. We critically review the measures commonly used to quantify phase locking and urge caution when interpreting such measures with respect to spike-timing precision. We also review the dependence of phase locking on stimulus amplitude and frequency. Finally, we identify some open questions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Systems Physiology of Learning, Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology, Magdeburg, 39118, Germany.|Center for Behavioral Brain Sciences, Magdeburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Heil
authors.affiliation: Department of Systems Physiology of Learning, Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology, Magdeburg, 39118, Germany.
authors.forename: Adam J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Peterson
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials; D000818:Animals; D001307:Auditory Perception; D003056:Cochlear Nerve / Q000502:physiology*; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory; D011930:Reaction Time; D009435:Synaptic Transmission
keywords: auditory nerve; phase locking; spike timing; spontaneous activity; temporal precision