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Published November 1, 1996 | Published
Journal Article Open

Tolerance to Sound Intensity of Binaural Coincidence Detection in the Nucleus Laminaris of the Owl

Abstract

Neurons of the owl's nucleus laminaris serve as coincidence detectors for measurement of interaural time difference. The discharge rate of nucleus laminaris neurons for both monaural and binaural stimulation increased with sound intensity until they reached an asymptote. Intense sounds affected neither the ratio between binaural and monaural responses nor the interaural time difference for which nucleus laminaris neurons were selective. Theoretical analysis showed that high afferent discharge rates cause coincidence detectors with only excitatory input to lose their selectivity for interaural time difference when coincidence of impulses from the same side becomes as likely as that of impulses from the two sides. We hypothesize that inhibitory input whose strength increases with sound intensity protects nucleus laminaris neurons from losing their sensitivity to interaural time difference with intense sounds.

Additional Information

© 1996 Society for Neuroscience. For the first six months after publication SfN's license will be exclusive. Beginning six months after publication the Work will be made freely available to the public on SfN's website to copy, distribute, or display under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Received June 10, 1996; revised Aug. 7, 1996; accepted Aug. 9, 1996. This work was supported by National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Grant DC-00134 and postdoctoral fellowships from the Pew Latin American Fellows Program (J.L.P.), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (S.V.), and the Sloan Center for Theoretical Neurobiology at Caltech (Y.A.). We thank Jamie Mazer and Chris Malek for assistance with computer programming and Catherine Carr, Roian Egnor, Jamie Mazer, Terry Takahashi, Larry Proctor, and Marc Schmidt for reading an early version of this paper. Ben Arthur commented on this manuscript.

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August 22, 2023
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October 25, 2023