Summary
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1.
The mating (advertisement) calls of two sibling species of gray treefrogs,Hyla versicolor andHyla chrysoscelis, are spectrally identical but differ in trill rate; being higher forH. chrysoscelis. Single-unit recordings were made from the torus semicircularis of both species to investigate the neural mechanisms by which this species-specific temporal feature is analyzed. Using sinusoidally amplitude-modulated (AM) white noise as a stimulus, the temporal selectivity of these midbrain auditory neurons could be described by five response categories: ‘AM nonselective’ (34%); ‘AM high-pass’ (7%); ‘AM low-pass’ (6%); ‘AM band-suppression’ (12%); ‘AM tuned’ (40%).
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2.
The distributions of temporal tuning values (i.e., modulation rate at which each AM-tuned unit responds maximally) are broad; in both species, neurons were found which were tuned to modulation rates greater than those found in their advertisement calls. Nevertheless, the temporal tuning values forH. versicolor (median=25 Hz) were significantly lower than those forH. chrysoscelis (median=32.5 Hz).
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3.
The temporal selectivities of AM band-suppression neurons were found to be temperature dependent. The modulation rate at which a response minimum was observed shifted to higher values as the temperature was elevated. These results extend our earlier findings of temperature-dependent temporal selectivity in the gray treefrog.
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4.
The selectivity of band-suppression and AM-tuned neurons to various rates of amplitude modulation was largely, but not completely, indepndent of whether sinusoidal or natural forms of AM were used.
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Abbreviations
- AM :
-
amplitude modulated
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Rose, G.J., Brenowitz, E.A. & Capranica, R.R. Species specificity and temperature dependency of temporal processing by the auditory midbrain of two species of treefrogs. J. Comp. Physiol. 157, 763–769 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01350073
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01350073