Computer-based auditory neurophysiology laboratory

Abstract

For nearly 2 decades our laboratory has carried on microelectrode studies of the auditory nervous system. A primary objective of these studies is to determine how the properties of an acoustical stimulus are represented or coded in the temporal patterns of all-or-none spike discharges that may be recorded from single neural units (cell bodies or fibers). For many years, following the pioneering observations of Galambos and Davis (3), the only available methods for study of unit discharge patterns involved either laborious manual measurement of oscilloscope tracings or rough estimation of the threshold of unit discharge by listening to the amplified activity. Although qualitative techniques were developed to deal with the massive amounts of data that result from experiments of this kind, it was not until Gerstein and Kiang (4) and their colleagues at MIT introduced the digital computer that it became possible to perform precise statistical analyses of unit discharge patterns as they occur in real time.

This research was aided by NIH grants NS 06225 and RR 00249.