Frequency difference beyond behavioral limen reflected by frequency following response of human auditory Brainstem

BioMedical Engineering OnLine

Qin Xu¹  Qin Gong¹ 

[1] Postal address: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Medical School, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

关键词: Frequency discrimination;    Frequency difference limen (FDL);    Frequency following response (FFR);   

Others  :  1084550
DOI  :  10.1186/1475-925X-13-114

 received in 2014-01-14, accepted in 2014-08-04,  发布年份 2014

【 摘 要 】

Background

The present study investigated whether the frequency-following response (FFR) of the auditory brainstem can represent individual frequency-discrimination ability.

Method

We measured behavioral frequency-difference limens (FDLs) in normal hearing young adults. Then FFRs were evoked by two pure tones, whose frequency difference was no larger than behavioral FDL. Discrimination of FFRs to individual frequencies was conducted as the neural representation of stimulus frequency difference. Participants were 15 Chinese college students (ages 19–25; 3 males, 12 females) with normal hearing characteristics.

Results

According to discriminative neural representations of individual frequencies, FFRs accurately reflected individual FDLs and detected stimulus-frequency differences smaller than behavioral threshold (e.g., 75% of FDL).

Conclusions

These results suggest that when a frequency difference cannot be behaviorally distinguished, there is still a possibility of it being detected physiologically.

【 授权许可】

   
2014 Xu and Gong; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

【 图 表 】

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