Quantitative investigation of the 'paired-click' method: some limitations and insights

This paper examines analytically and by simulation a method described by Møller, (Møller, A.R. (1970): Acta Physiol. Scand. 78, 299-314) using click-pairs to characterize the linear component of a system which contains nonlinearities. Møller has used the method to obtain the filter function of the response of neural units in the peripheral auditory system. We show that exact solutions for the filter functions are obtained with this method only if the system nonlinearity is quadratic. The method offers approximate solutions for systems containing other even-order nonlinearities, since the resulting filter functions are 'contaminated' by higher-order terms.