Neuronal coding of interaural transient envelope disparities

Onsets are salient and important transient (i.e. dynamic) features of acoustic signals, and evoke vigorous responses from most auditory neurons, but paradoxically these onset responses have most often been analysed with respect to steady‐state stimulus features, e.g. the sound pressure level (SPL). In nearly all studies concerned with the coding of differences in SPL at the two ears (interaural level differences; ILDs), which provide a major cue for the azimuthal location of high frequency sound sources, interaural onset disparities were covaried with ILD, but the possibly confounding effects of this covariation on neuronal responses have been entirely neglected. Therefore, dichotic stimulus paradigms were designed here in which onset and steady‐state features were varied independently. Responses were recorded from single neurons in the inferior colliculus of rats, anaesthetized with pentobarbital and xylazine. It is demonstrated that onset responses, or the onset response components of neurons with more complex temporal response patterns, are dependent on the binaural combination of dynamic envelope features associated with conventional ILD stimulus paradigms, but not on the binaural combination of steady‐state SPLs reached after the onset. In contrast, late or sustained response components appear more sensitive to the binaural combination of steady‐state SPLs. These data stress the general necessity for a separate analysis of onset and late response components, with respect to different stimulus features, and suggest a need for re‐evaluation of existing studies on ILD coding. The sensitivity of onset responses to the binaural combination of envelope transients, rather than to steady‐state ILD, is in line with their sensitivity to other interaural envelope disparities, created by stationary or moving sounds.