ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2013
Refractoriness enhances temporal coding by auditory nerve fibers.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- The case against efficiency: friction in social media.Npj complexity · 2026Review
- Structure and function of otoferlin, a synaptic protein of sensory hair cells essential for hearing.Science advances · 2025Article
- Investigating Compressive Nonlinearity Using Forward Masking Auditory Brainstem Response in Humans.Journal of the American Academy of Audiology · 2025Article
- Article
- Beyond Wilson-Cowan dynamics: oscillations and chaos without inhibition.Biological cybernetics · 2022Article
- Comparison of response properties of the electrically stimulated auditory nerve reported in human listeners and in animal models.Hearing research · 2022Review
- A comprehensive computational model of animal biosonar signal processing.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Theoretical Relationship Between Two Measures of Spike Synchrony: Correlation Index and Vector Strength.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Article
- Phase Locking of Auditory Nerve Fibers: The Role of Lowpass Filtering by Hair Cells.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2020Article
- Phase Locking of Auditory-Nerve Fibers Reveals Stereotyped Distortions and an Exponential Transfer Function with a Level-Dependent Slope.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2019Article
- Small conductance CaeLife · 2017Article
- Modeling elucidates how refractory period can provide profound nonlinear gain control to graded potential neurons.Physiological reports · 2017Article
- The Electrically Evoked Compound Action Potential: From Laboratory to Clinic.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2017Review
- Tonotopic Optimization for Temporal Processing in the Cochlear Nucleus.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2016Article
- Temporal Considerations for Stimulating Spiral Ganglion Neurons with Cochlear Implants.Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology : JARO · 2016Review
- Independent population coding of speech with sub-millisecond precision.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2013Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A universal property of spiking neurons is refractoriness, a transient decrease in discharge probability immediately following an action potential (spike). The refractory period lasts only one to a few milliseconds, but has the potential to affect temporal coding of acoustic stimuli by auditory neurons, which are capable of submillisecond spike-time precision. Here this possibility was investigated systematically by recording spike times from chicken auditory nerve fibers in vivo while stimulating with repeated pure tones at characteristic frequency. Refractory periods were tightly distributed, with a mean of 1.58 ms. A statistical model was developed to recapitulate each fiber's responses and then used to predict the effect of removing the refractory period on a cell-by-cell basis for two largely independent facets of temporal coding: faithful entrainment of interspike intervals to the stimulus frequency and precise synchronization of spike times to the stimulus phase. The ratio of the refractory period to the stimulus period predicted the impact of refractoriness on entrainment and synchronization. For ratios less than ∼0.9, refractoriness enhanced entrainment and this enhancement was often accompanied by an increase in spike-time precision. At higher ratios, little or no change in entrainment or synchronization was observed. Given the tight distribution of refractory periods, the ability of refractoriness to improve temporal coding is restricted to neurons responding to low-frequency stimuli. Enhanced encoding of low frequencies likely affects sound localization and pitch perception in the auditory system, as well as perception in nonauditory sensory modalities, because all spiking neurons exhibit refractoriness.
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