Peripheral vasoconstriction in the rat in response to sound. I. Dependence on stimulus duration

Vasoconstriction in response to sound has been studied in the non-anaesthetized rat. Arterial pulsations in the tail were recorded by a non-invasive technique. Broad-band noise bursts at 80 dB SPL with durations from 1 ms to several hours were presented in a free field in a sound-isolated box. The results show that acoustic energy is integrated with a time constant of about 0.1 s. The responses during continuous stimulation habituated slowly and the time to halfway normalization of arterial pulsation was more than 15 min.