Auditory Brainstem Responses to Successive Sounds: Effects of Gap Duration and Depth.

Fan-Yin Cheng,Craig A Champlin

doi:10.3390/audiolres11010005

Abstract

Temporal acuity is the ability to differentiate between sounds based on fluctuations in the waveform envelope. The proximity of successive sounds and background noise diminishes the ability to track rapid changes between consecutive sounds. We determined whether a physiological correlate of temporal acuity is also affected by these factors. We recorded the auditory brainstem response (ABR) from human listeners using a harmonic complex (S1) followed by a brief tone burst (S2) with the latter serving as the evoking signal. The duration and depth of the silent gap between S1 and S2 were manipulated, and the peak latency and amplitude of wave V were measured. The latency of the responses decreased significantly as the duration or depth of the gap increased. The amplitude of the responses was not affected by the duration or depth of the gap. These findings suggest that changing the physical parameters of the gap affects the auditory system’s ability to encode successive sounds.

Highlights

The results reported below were obtained in a similar manner, namely the amplitude and latency of wave V in response to S2 were measured under various conditions of gap duration and depth
The mean response latencies and amplitudes for different gap durations are shown in The mean response latencies and amplitudes for different gap durations are shown panels “a” and “b,” respectively of Figure 5
As revealed in the figure, response latency increased as the gap duration decreased

Summary

Introduction

Identifying a sequence of acoustic events is an essential part of perceiving a sound stream [1]. Using successive sounds to mark a temporal cessing in brainstem responses, and (2) how the intensity of background noise influences gap, ourprocessing objective was to determine whether the latency and/or amplitude of the sensory in brainstem responses. If one or both of these manipdetection that potentially could be used in clinical situations where assessing temporal ulations altered measures of the ABR, we may have identified an objective measure resolution is notthat possible via behavioral methods This where study’sassessing results could of gap detection potentially could be used in clinical situations temprovide a picture of how neurons in the brainstem respond to different sound pairs that poral resolution is not possible via behavioral methods. Could provide a picture of how neurons in the brainstem respond to different sound pairs that have similar acoustical traits

Participants

Data Analysis

Results

Experiment 1

Experiment 2

Discussions