ABSTRACT
One of the major research programs in auditory neuroscience is the attempt to explain psychophysical performance in terms of neuronal processing (see review in Delgutte, 1996). Some of the basic phenomena in hearing can be roughly explained using the known anatomy and physiology of the auditory periphery and early central stations. For instance, the critical bands of psychoacoustics are related to the narrow tuning of auditory nerve fibers (Pickles, 1975) or of neurons in the inferior colliculus (Ehret & Merzenich, 1988). Similarly, the representation of interaural time differences (ITD) and binaural unmasking phenomena may be related to the calculation of cross-correlation between the peripheral representations of sounds in the two ears (Colburn, 1996), neurally implemented in the superior olive (Brand et al., 2002; Grothe, 2003; Yin & Chan, 1990) and clearly present at the level of the inferior colliculus (IC; Fitzpatrick et al., 2002; Shackleton et al., 2003).
