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Published December 1, 1986 | Published
Journal Article Open

Selectivity for lnteraural Time Difference in the Owl's Midbrain

Abstract

The barn owl uses the interaural difference in the timing of sounds to determine the azimuth of the source. When the sound has a wide frequency band, localization is precise. When localizing tones, however, the barn owl errs in a manner that suggests that it is confused by phantom targets. We report a neural equivalent of these phenomena as they are observed in the space-specific neuron of the owl's inferior colliculus. When stimulated with a tone, the space- specific neuron discharges maximally at interaural time differences (ITDs) that differ by one period of the stimulus tone. Changing the stimulus frequency changes the period of the ITD-response functions, but 1 ITD evokes, in most neurons, a maximal response, regardless of frequency. This ITD is the characteristic delay (CD). When stimulated with noise, there is a maximal response only to ITDs at or near the CD. Thus, the space-specific neuron can unambiguously signal the CD, provided that the signal contains more than 1 frequency. The preferential response to a single ITD, which is observed with noise stimuli, was also observed when the summed waveform of the best frequency and another tone, F2, was presented. The response of the space-specific neuron to these 2-tone stimuli could not be accounted for by the summing or averaging of the ITD-response functions obtained with the best frequency or F2 alone, suggesting that nonlinear neural processes are involved.

Additional Information

© 1986 by 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 May 24, 1985; revised May 27, 1986; accepted June 6, 1986. We thank Drs. Andrew Moiseff, W. E. Sullivan, and Hermann Wagner for their helpful comments. This work was supported by NIH Grant NS14617 (M.K.) and NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship NS06825 (T.T.).

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August 19, 2023
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