Stimulus level is coded by firing rate plus the pattern across fiber types

Evidence

Although all fibers will fire to a 50 dB SPL stimulus, they will not all code an increase in stimulus level. Only the medium and high threshold fibers will have an increase in firing rate if the stimulus level increased from 50 dB SPL. In this way, we see two physiological codes for stimulus level: the firing rate of individual fibers and the pattern of firing rates across the three different fiber types. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 701

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Identifies the two distinct neural codes for stimulus level in the auditory nerve.

Related

• Different auditory nerve fiber types have distinct response thresholds. (similarity 0.90)
• Auditory nerve fibers’ thresholds correlate inversely with their spontaneous firing rates. (similarity 0.89)
• High spontaneous-rate nerve fibers have low thresholds and vice versa (similarity 0.88)
• High spontaneous-rate fibers have low thresholds while low SR fibers have high thresholds. (similarity 0.87)
• Auditory nerve fibers divide into three types by spontaneous firing rate. (similarity 0.87)
• Loudness coding requires pooled responses across many auditory nerve fibers (similarity 0.86)
• Auditory nerve fibers of three spontaneous-rate types code different level ranges (similarity 0.86)
• Loudness cannot be explained by single auditory nerve fiber firing alone (similarity 0.82)
• Pure-tone temporal coding is low-frequency only, but complex tones use both fiber types. (similarity 0.82)
• 95 percent of auditory nerve fibers carry coded signals from inner hair cells upward (similarity 0.81)
• Neural information is encoded in the patterning of voltage spikes (similarity 0.81)
• Clean auditory sensation emerges only from pooling many noisy nerve fibres (similarity 0.80)
• Auditory nerve fibers skip cycles, uncoupling spike timing from firing rate (similarity 0.80)
• A single auditory nerve fibre’s firing is unpredictable and noisy (similarity 0.79)
• Nerve firing intervals are integer multiples of the stimulus period (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• High spontaneous-rate nerve fibers have low thresholds and vice versa #complicates (0.75) — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 235