Detection of gaps in sinusoids by frog auditory nerve fibers: importance in AM coding

Physiological studies were carried out in the frog (Rana pipiens pipiens) eighth nerve to determine: (i) whether the modulation rate or the silent gap was the salient feature that set the upper limit of time-locking to pulsed amplitude-modulated (PAM) stimuli, (ii) the gap detection capacity of individual eighth nerve fibers. Time-locked responses of 79 eighth nerve fibers to PAM stimuli (at the fiber's characteristic frequency) showed that the synchronization coefficient was a low-pass function of the modulation rate. In response to PAM stimuli having different pulse durations, a fiber gave rise to non-overlapping modulation transfer functions. The upper cut-off frequency of time locking was higher when tone-pulses in PAM stimuli had shorter duration. The fact that the cut-off frequency was different for the different PAM series suggested that the AM rate was neither the sole, nor the main, determinant for the decay in time-locking at high AM rates. Gap detection capacity was determined for 69 eighth nerve fibers by assessing fiber's spiking activities to paired tone-pulses during an OFF-window and an ON-window. It was found that the minimum detectable gap of eighth nerve fibers ranged from 0.5 to 10 ms with an average of 1.23-2.16 ms depending on the duration of paired tone pulses. For each fiber, the minimum detectable gap was longer when the duration of tone pulses comprising the twin-pulse stimuli was more than four times longer. When the synchronization coefficient was plotted against the silent gap between tones pulses in the PAM stimuli, the gap response functions of a fiber as derived from multiple PAM series were equivalent to gap response functions deriving from twin-pulse series suggesting that it was the silent gap which primarily determined the upper limit of time-locking to PAM stimuli.