Journal of Comparative Physiology A

, Volume 178, Issue 2, pp 147–157 | Cite as

Neurons with different temporal firing patterns in the inferior colliculus of the little brown bat differentially process sinusoidal amplitude-modulated signals

  • C. J. Condon
  • K. R. White
  • A. S. Feng
Original Paper
Accepted:

Abstract

We examined how well single neurons in the inferior colliculus (IC) of an FM bat (Myotis lucifugus) processed simple tone bursts of different duration and sinusoidal amplitude-modulated (SAM) signals that approximated passively heard natural sounds. Units' responses to SAM tones, measured in terms of average spike count and firing synchrony to the modulation envelope, were plotted as a function of the modulation frequency to construct their modulation transfer functions. These functions were classified according to their shape (e.g., band-, low-, high-, and all-pass). IC neurons having different temporal firing patterns to simple tone bursts (tonic, chopper, onset-late, and onset-immediate) exhibited different selectivities for SAM signals. All tonic and 83% of chopper neurons responded robustly to SAM signals and displayed a variety of spike count-based response functions. These neurons showed a decreased level of time-locking as the modulation frequency was increased, and thereby gave low-pass synchronization-based response functions. In contrast, 64% of onset-immediate, 37% of onset-late and 17% of chopper units failed to respond to SAM signals at any modulation frequency tested (5–800 Hz). Those onset neurons that did respond to SAM showed poor time-locking (i.e., non-significant levels of synchronization). We obtained evidence that the poor SAM response of some onset and chopper neurons was due to a preference for short-duration signals. These data suggest that tonic and most chopper neurons are better-suited for the processing of long-duration SAM signals related to passive hearing, whereas onset neurons are better-suited for the processing of short, pulsatile signals such as those used in echolocation.

Key words

Bat Inferior colliculus Echolocation Passive hearing Amplitude-modulation 

Abbreviations

C

chopper

FM

frequency-modulated

IC

inferior colliculus

MTF

modulation transfer function

O1

onset-immediate

OL

onset-late

PAM

pulsatile amplitude-modulation

PSTH

peri-stimulus time histogram

SAM

sinusoidal amplitude-modulation

SC

synchronization coefficient

T

tonic

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag 1996

Authors and Affiliations

  • C. J. Condon
    • 1
  • K. R. White
    • 1
  • A. S. Feng
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Physiology and Biophysicsthe Neuroscience Program, and the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignUrbanaUSA

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