COMPARATIVE-ANALYSIS OF SPECTROTEMPORAL RECEPTIVE-FIELDS, REVERSE CORRELATION-FUNCTIONS, AND FREQUENCY TUNING CURVES OF AUDITORY-NERVE FIBERS

The tuning properties of single auditory-nerve fibers (ANFs) are chara cterized with spectro-temporal receptive fields (STRFs), reverse corre lation functions (revcors), and frequency tuning curves (FTCs). Measur es of tuning and latency from the STRFS and revcors are largely compar able to the traditional measures of tuning from FTCs and measures of l atency from peristimulus time histograms (PSTHs), but several importan t differences are found. As is well known, revcors can only, character ize low ( < 6 kHz) best frequency (BF) units, whereas STRFs are able t o characterize all units studied (BFs ranging from 0.26-23 kHz), excep t for a few very low-BF examples. Whereas tuning bandwidth derived fro m revcor exceeds that measured from FTCs at all BFs and increases with sound level, STRF bandwidth is comparable to FTC bandwidth, except at low BFs, and is stable with sound level. The STRF may reflect nonline ar properties of auditory-nerve fibers such as refractoriness and two- tone suppression that are absent in the FTC and revcor characterizatio ns. The principal drawback of the STRF is its narrow dynamic range.