Binaural interaction in human auditory brainstem response compared for tone-pips and rectangular clicks under...

Binaural interaction in the auditory brainstem response (ABR) represents the discrepancy between the binaural waveform and the sum of monaural ones. A typical ABR binaural interaction in humans is a reduction of the binaural amplitude compared to the monaural sum at the wave-V latency, i.e., the DN1 component. It has been considered that the DN1 is mainly elicited by high frequency components of stimuli whereas some studies have shown the contribution of low-to-middle frequency components to the DN1. To examine this issue, the present study compared the ABR binaural interaction elicited by tone pips (1 kHz, 10-ms duration) with the one by clicks (a rectangular wave, 0.1-ms duration) presented at 80 dB peak equivalent SPL and a fixed stimulus onset interval (180 ms). The DN1 due to tone pips was vulnerable compared to the click-evoked DN1. The pip-evoked DN1 was significantly detected under auditory attention whereas it failed to reach significance under visual attention. The click-evoked DN1 was robustly present for the two attention conditions. The current results might confirm the high frequency sound contribution to the DN1 elicitation.