Abstract
In reverberant environments, acoustic reflections interfere with the direct sound arriving at a listener’s ears, distorting the binaural cues for sound localization. Using virtual auditory space simulation techniques, we investigated the effects of reverberation on the directional rate responses of single neurons in the inferior colliculus (IC) of unanesthetized rabbits. We find that reverberation degrades the directional sensitivity of single neurons, although the amount of degradation depends on the characteristic frequency (CF) and the type of binaural cues available. To investigate the extent to which these midbrain results reflect peripheral processing of the monaural input signals, we extracted directional information from spike trains recorded from auditory nerve (AN) in anesthetized cat for the same VAS stimuli. Our results suggest that the frequency-dependent degradation in ITD-based directional sensitivity in reverberation originates in the auditory periphery.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Allen JB, Berkley DA (1979) Image method for efficiently simulating small-room acoustics. J Acoust Soc Am 65:943–950
Batra R, Kuwada S, Stanford TR (1993) High-frequency neurons in the inferior colliculus that are sensitive to interaural delays of amplitude-modulated tones: evidence for dual binaural influences. J Neurophysiol 70:64–80
Borg E, Engstrom B, Linde G, Marklund K (1988) Eighth nerve fiber firing features in normal-hearing rabbits. Hear Res 36:191–201
Delgutte B, Joris PX, Litovsky RY, Yin TC (1995) Relative importance of different acoustic cues to the directional sensitivity of inferior colliculus neurons. In: Manley GA, Klump GM, Koeppl C, Fastl H, Oeckinghaus H (eds) Advances in hearing research. World Scientific, Singapore, pp 288–299
Devore S, Ihlefeld A, Hancock K, Shinn-Cunningham B, Delgutte B (2009) Accurate sound localization in reverberant environments is mediated by robust encoding of spatial cues in the auditory midbrain. Neuron 62:123–134
Dreyer A, Delgutte B (2006) Phase locking of auditory-nerve fibers to the envelopes of high-frequency sounds: implications for sound localization. J Neurophysiol 96:2327–2341
Griffin SJ, Bernstein LJ, Ingham NJ, McAlpine DM (2005) Neural sensitivity to envelope delays in the inferior colliculus of guinea pigs. J Neurophysiol 93:3463–3478
Joris PX (2003) Interaural time sensitivity dominated by cochlea-induced envelope patterns. J Neurosci 23:6345–6350
Kuwada S, Stanford TR, Batra R (1987) Interaural phase sensitive units in the inferior colliculus of the unanesthetized rabbit. Effects of changing frequency. J Neurophysiol 57:1338–1360
Louage DH, van der Heijden M, Joris PX (2004) Temporal properties of responses to broadband noise in the auditory nerve. J Neurophysiol 91:2051–2065
Macpherson EA, Middlebrooks JC (2002) Listener weighting of cues for lateral angle: the duplex theory of sound localization revisited. J Acoust Soc Am 111:2219–2236
Palmer AR, Liu LF, Shackleton TM (2007) Changes in interaural time sensitivity with interaural level differences in the inferior colliculus. Hear Res 223:105–113
Rakerd B, Hartmann WM, Pepin E (2006) Localizing noise in rooms via stead state interaural time differences. J Acoust Soc Am 120:3082–3083
Rayleigh L (1907) On our perception of sound direction. Philos Mag 13:214–232
Sayles M, Winter IM (2008) Reverberation challenges the temporal representation of the pitch of complex sounds. Neuron 58:789–801
Shinn-Cunningham BG, Desloge JG, Kopco N (2001) Empirical and modeled acoustic transfer functions in a simple room: effects of distance and direction. In: 2001 IEEE workshop on applications of signal processing to audio and acoustics. New Pfaltz, New York, pp 419–423
Yin TCT, Kuwada S, Sujaku Y (1984) Interaural time sensitivity of high frequency neurons in the inferior colliculus. J Acoust Soc Amer 76:1401–1410
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Laurel Carney and Shig Kuwada for their help with the awake rabbit preparation, Ken Hancock for software support, and Melissa Wood and Connie Miller for technical assistance. Supported by NIH grants RO1 DC002258 and P30 DC005209 and a Helen Carr Peake Research Assistantship to SD.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
About this paper
Cite this paper
Devore, S., Schwartz, A., Delgutte, B. (2010). Effect of Reverberation on Directional Sensitivity of Auditory Neurons: Central and Peripheral Factors. In: Lopez-Poveda, E., Palmer, A., Meddis, R. (eds) The Neurophysiological Bases of Auditory Perception. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5686-6_26
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5686-6_26
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-5685-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-5686-6
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life SciencesBiomedical and Life Sciences (R0)