Interaction between resonant scaling and fundamental frequency on codings in auditory system

Abstract

It has been modeled that the auditory system encodes acoustic signals into two independent informations. One is tonotopic information reflecting the frequency response characteristics of the basilar membrane, and another is periodicity information reflecting the temporal patterns of phase-locked auditory nerve firing. Based on the previous study about size perception of sound source, a hypothesis can be proposed that the tonotopic and periodicity information are combined into an internal representational The current study tested that this hypothesis by conducting an experiment to recognize the transition of vowel-like sounds on the plane. Listeners were able to recognize the transition patterns on the axes of tonotopic and periodicity information exclusively. However, they were unable to follow the trajectories of sounds in the two-dimensional representational plane. The vowel-like sounds were simulated by a computational model of auditory system, AIM. While the excitation pattern displayed transition patterns corresponding to the manipulation of resonant scaling (RS) only, summary SAI displayed both of patterns of fundamental frequency (F0) and RS. It suggests the need to confirm whether RS represented in periodicity information is used for size perception.