NONLINEAR EFFECTS OF NOISE ON PHASE-LOCKED COCHLEAR-NERVE RESPONSES TO SINUSOIDAL STIMULI

It is well known that, in a cochlear afferent axon with background spi ke activity, a sinusoidal stimulus (tone) of sufficiently low frequenc y will produce periodic modulation of the instantaneous spike rate, th e alternating half cycles of which comprise excursions above and below the mean background spike rate, It also is known that if the amplitud e of the stimulus is sufficiently small, the instantaneous spike rate follows very nearly a sinusoidal trajectory through these positive and negative excursions. For such cases, we define the AC responsiveness of a primary auditory afferent axon to be the amplitude of sinusoidal modulation of the instantaneous spike rate divided by the amplitude of the tone producing that modulation. In the experiments described in t his paper, changes in AC responsiveness were followed during and after sudden changes in the background noise level. When the amplitude of t he tone was sufficiently small relative to that of the noise, we found that the AC responsiveness can be strongly dependent on the time elap sed since the last change in noise level, while being nearly independe nt of the amplitude of the tone itself. Under those circumstances, aft er transitions between noise levels 20 dB apart, we observed changes i n AC responsiveness that consistently followed time courses similar to those of the short-term mean (background) spike rate (approximating t he adapting response to the noise alone), unfolding over several milli seconds or tens of milliseconds. At the time of the transition between noise levels, there was another change in AC responsiveness, which ap peared to be instantaneous; as the noise level increased, the AC respo nsiveness immediately increased with it. This seemingly paradoxical ef fect and the similarity of the time courses of AC responsiveness and s hort-term mean spike rate both are consistent with a simple, descripti ve model of spike generation involving the shifting of threshold along a bell curve.