Comparison of brainstem frequency-following responses associated with auditory streaming based on spectral and temporal cues

Abstract

With the ABA streaming paradigm (van Noorden, 1975), Yamagishi et al. (2016) used spectrally differing A and B tones and showed that the auditory brainstem frequency-following response (FFR) to the second A tone co-varied with the perceived auditory stream. This study examined whether this effect is specific to the case in which the streaming is based on the spectral cues. We compared stream-perception-related FFRs between ABA stimuli based on spectral and temporal cues. In the spectral condition, the A and B tones differed in frequency (315 and 400 Hz, respectively). In the temporal condition, the stimulus consisted of sinusoidally amplitude-modulated 4-kHz tones that had identical long-term excitation patterns but differed in modulation frequency (60 and 170 Hz, respectively). We analyzed the spectral amplitudes of the FFRs at the stimulus frequencies for the spectral condition and those at the stimulus modulation frequencies for the temporal condition. We found that the FFR amplitudes to the second A tone generally tended to be larger in the two-stream percept than in the one-stream one for both the spectral and temporal conditions. This result implies that the mechanism responsible for the stream-perception-related FFR is common across cue domains.