| Summary: | 3pAB5. Temporal resolution in the hearing system and auditory evoked potentials. Kristian Beedholm Institute of Biology,University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M, Denmark, beedholm@mail.dk, Lee A. Miller Institute of Biology,University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M, Denmark, lee@biology.sdu.dkA popular type of investigation with auditory evoked potentials AEP consists of mapping the dependency of the envelope followingresponse to the AM frequency. This results in what is called the modulation rate transfer function MRTF. The physiologicalinterpretation of the MRTF is not straight forward, but is often used as a measure of the ability of the auditory system to encodetemporal changes. It is, however, shown here that the MRTF must depend on the waveform of the click-evoked AEP ceAEP, whichdoes not relate directly to temporal resolution. The theoretical relationship between the spectrum of the ceAEP and MRTF is such thatthe MRTF should be identical to the ceAEP if a 1"f weighting is applied to the ceAEP. Deviations from this relationship indeed reflecttemporal resolution capabilities.We measured this in a harbour porpoise. Our devised stimulus was a sequence of 0.5 ms Hann weighted130 kHz tone pips presented at an increasing rate chirped over a time span of 32 ms. The results reveal that the system's responsivenessdeclines roughly exponentially as a function of click rate with a rate constant of about -0.7 kHz and appears more rate limited thanimplied by traditional MRTF.
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