Influence of inhibitory synaptic kinetics on the interaural time difference sensitivity in a linear model of binaural coincidence detection

Abstract

Temporal correlations between the sound waves arriving at the two ears are used to extract the azimuthal position of sound sources. Nerve cells in the mammalian medial superior olive (MSO) that extract these binaural correlations are sensitive to interaural time differences (ITDs) in the range of about 10 micros. These neurons receive inputs from the two ears via four pathways, two excitatory and two inhibitory ones. In this paper, a simple linear model is fitted to the frequency dependence of ITD sensitivity of MSO neurons, which is quantified by the two parameters, characteristic phase and characteristic delay. The fit parameters are the relative delays and the relative strengths of the two inhibitory pathways and thus specify the underlying ITD-detecting circuit assuming a non-Jeffress-like situation, i.e., no excitatory delay lines but phase-locked inhibition. The fitting procedure finds the parameters of these inhibitory pathways such that they account for a desired frequency dependence of ITD sensitivity. It is found that positive characteristic delays require a finite amount of ipsilateral inhibition that arrives at roughly the same time as ipsilateral excitation as well as contralateral inhibition that lags contralateral excitation so much that it effectively leads excitation of the next cycle.