Behavioral and physiological correlates of temporal pitch perception in electric and acoustic hearing

Carlyon, R.P., Mahendran, S., Deeks, J.M., Long, C.J., Axon, P., Baguley, D., Bleeck, S. and Winter, I.M. (2008) Behavioral and physiological correlates of temporal pitch perception in electric and acoustic hearing. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 123 (2), 973-985. (doi:10.1121/1.2821986). (PMID:2279014)

Abstract

In the “4–6” condition of experiment 1, normal-hearing (NH) listeners compared the pitch of a bandpass-filtered pulse train, whose inter-pulse intervals (IPIs) alternated between 4 and 6 ms, to that of isochronous pulse trains. Consistent with previous results obtained at a lower signal level, the pitch of the 4–6 stimulus corresponded to that of an isochronous pulse train having a period of 5.7 ms—longer than the mean IPI of 5 ms. In other conditions the IPI alternated between 3.5–5.5 and 4.5–6.5 ms. Experiment 2 was similar but presented electric pulse trains to one channel of a cochlear implant. In both cases, as overall IPI increased, the pitch of the alternating-interval stimulus approached that of an isochronous train having a period equal to the mean IPI. Experiment 3 measured compound action potentials (CAPs) to alternating-interval stimuli in guinea pigs and in NH listeners. The CAPs to pulses occurring after 4-ms intervals were smaller than responses to pulses occurring after 6-ms intervals, resulting in a modulated pattern that was independent of overall level. The results are compared to the predictions of a simple model incorporating auditory-nerve (AN) refractoriness, and where pitch is estimated from first-order intervals in the AN response.

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Contributors

Author: S. Bleeck

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