Emergence of band-pass filtering

through adaptive spiking in the owls

cochlear nucleus
Bertrand Fontaine, Katrina M. MacLeod, Susan T.
Lubejko, Louisa J. Steinberg, Christine Kppl, and
Jose L. Pea

Overview
After the cochlea, the auditory stream is
segregated into streams for level and timing;
nucleus angularis(NA) and nucleus
magnocellularis.
Structures along the ascending pathway are
increasingly selective for envelope frequency.
Envelope is important for encoding natural
sounds.

Construction of a Shuffled
Autocorrelogram
Start with a set of responses from one fiber to
repeated presentations of the same stimulus
Choose a pair of trials and one spike, then
calculate the time interval to all spikes in the
other trial
Repeat for every spike and every pair of
stimulus presentations, then normalize

Correlation Analysis
AN fibers follow the fine structure of
the sound, NA fibers encode the
envelope.
Sounds transmitted to the brain have
an envelope, even if the original sound
does not. The cochlear acts as a BPF,
which produces a product of each
neurons BF(carrier) with an envelope.

Calculation of Neuron Filter

Functions
For ANF fibers, the spike-triggered average(STA) is calculated:

For NA fibers, cells do not lock to the fine sound structure, so STA is not a useful
measure, instead use the second order Wiener kernel:

BF is defined as the frequency of the peak

 ANF fiber responses are more coherent with

the carrier(high frequencies), than the
envelope. NA fibers have the opposite
pattern, with a large DC component in the
coherence to envelope.
Max(C) is a measure of the amount of
information carried in the neurons output.
The ratio (correction to carrier/correlation to
envelope) is variable with input level.

Response Coherence

Coherence gives a measure of how correlated

S and R are at a given frequency. (between 0
and 1)

Modulation Transfer Function

MTRF is a visualization of the

response to envelope-like a STRF
but only for the envelope, MTF is
collapsed along the time axis.
Increasing stimulus amplitude
causes the DC component to
become smaller and the negative
peak larger

MTF
Characteristics

NA fibers are more lowpass at low

input levels and become bandpass as
stimulus intensity increases.
Negative sensitivity indicates that
the envelope correlation is higher for
BPFs.
The negative portion of the MTRF
correlates with spike pattern
reproducibility.

Summary
NA cells more efficiently encode the envelope at the output of cochlear channels
more efficiently than at their input.
Bandpass filtering properties can emerge as a function of stimulus amplitude.
Threshold adaptation is a mechanism for bandpass filtering, which can affect
transmission of DC components.

Source of SAC figures:

Pressnitzer, Daniel.Auditory Signal Processing: Physiology, Psychoacoustics, and Models. New
York, NY, USA: Springer, 2005. Print.