High-frequency auditory nerve fibers receive far more broadband noise power than low-frequency fibers.

Evidence

Noise impairs neural segregation of concurrent vowels independent of intonation pattern, but in a BF-dependent manner. Similar to other studies of noise-masked single-vowel coding (e.g., Delgutte and Kiang 1984 ; May et al. 1998 ), this is the consequence of higher-BF filters passing more total noise power than low-BF filters. The within-band signal-to-noise ratio is therefore much lower for high-BF units. The negative spectral tilt of the vowels, masked by flat-spectrum noise, imposes a similar frequency-dependency on signal-to-noise ratio after cochlear filtering. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5070

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the reading purpose on hearing physiology: within-band SNR asymmetry across BFs is a mechanical consequence of filter bandwidth.