Submitted on March 12, 2008
Revised on May 8, 2008
Accepted on May 27, 2008
Variability reduction in interaural time difference tuning in the barn owl
Brian J. Fischer1* and Masakazu Konishi1
1 California Institute of Technology
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: fischerb{at}caltech.edu.
The interaural time difference (ITD) is the primary auditory cue used by the barn owl for localization in the horizontal direction. ITD is initially computed by circuits consisting of axonal delay lines from one of the cochlear nuclei and coincidence detector neurons in the nucleus laminaris (NL). NL projects directly to the anterior part of the dorsal lateral lemniscal nucleus (LLDa) and this area projects to the core of the central nucleus of the inferior colliculus (ICcc) in the midbrain. To show the selectivity of an NL neuron for ITD requires averaging of responses over several stimulus presentations for each ITD. In contrast, ICcc neurons detect their preferred ITD in a single burst of stimulus (Christianson and Pena 2006). We recorded extracellularly the responses of LLDa neurons to ITD in anesthetized barn owls and show that this ability is already present in LLDa, raising the possibility that ICcc inherits its noise reduction property from LLDa.
