The cochlea’s compressive nonlinearity may act as a time-averaging gain control, not instantaneously.

Evidence

The extent to which a compressive input-output relation holds when the intensity of a stimulus fluctuates in time has not been studied systematically, however, and the possibility that the cochlea operates more like an automatic gain control (AGC) system than an instantaneously nonlinear system remains feasible (van der Heijden 2005 ). In the present study, we investigate the dynamics of the cochlea’s compressive mechanism(s) by observing BM responses to balanced, beating pairs of low-level tones near the recording site’s characteristic frequency (CF). — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 3628

Categorization

• QUESTION: Whether cochlear compression is an AGC rather than an instantaneous nonlinearity is an open question worth tracking — could reshape how dynamic stimuli are modeled.