Auditory cortex responses to temporal modulation of intracochlear electrical stimulation

摘要

Cochlear implants are widely used to improve verbal communication of deaft patients. But the performance of the auditory system with animplant is not well understood. Temporal coding strategies used for the stimulation of the auditory nerve are relatively crude. Transferring the time structure of the auditory signal to suitable impulse patterns in the cochlear prosthesis will be most important. But it is not clear, low the transformation should be made. Due to a great number of variables involved the problem may only be solved empirically by analyzing neuronal responses in the auditory pathway and most suitably in terms of input-output functions at the level of auditory cortex. We have investigated the effects of intracochlear electrical stimulation on neuronal discharges in gerbil auditory cortex field AI using signals with complex time structure.