Interaural attenuation in the cat, measured with single fibre data

Acoustic crosstalk was measured in the pentobarbital anesthetized cat using the responses of single units in the auditory nerve to ipsilateral and contralateral sound stimuli. The mean interaural attenuation (IATT) was found to be 76 dB between 350 and 18,000 Hz. No systematic variation of IATT with frequency was found although a large variation between different units with similar characteristic frequencies could be seen. We suggest that this scatter is due to the complex fine structure of the bone conduction pathways (Tonndorf (1966) Bone conduction. Acta Otolaryngol. Suppl. 213, 1-132). There are large discrepancies between these data and values obtained using cochlear microphonic potentials as an indicator. We suggest that cochlear microphonic crosstalk data in the literature should be treated with caution as it is extremely difficult to exclude the effect or direct electrical crosstalk on these analog signals.