Topic: auditory pathway

Bats, like all mammals, rely on the identification of regulations and deviations in their acoustic environment. This phenomenon, called deviance detection, has been studied intensively in the past and keeps gaining attention in the field of electrophysiology. Over time, an impressive complexity of deviance detection could be shown, in both animal and human studies. However, complex forms of auditory deviance detection were so far only demonstrated for high-level brain structures. Here, we used a naturalistic acoustic stimulation protocol to demonstrate that complex deviance detection already h

Deafness leads to different degrees of changes along the auditory pathway depending on the timing and duration. Here we investigate the effect of unilateral and bilateral neonatal deafness (ND) compared to bilateral adult deafness (AD) on the volume development of the cochlear nucleus (CN) of rats.Unilateral ND was induced in rats on postnatal (P) day 10 by intracochlear injection of neomycin. Bilateral ND was induced by intraperitoneal injection of kanamycin (P10-20). Bilateral AD was induced by injection of ethacrynic acid and kanamycin in 3- and 12-months old rats. Hearing thresholds of &gt

The auditory loss is associated with increased cognitive deterioration and even dementia, including Alzheimer's Disease (AD). However, the relation between the cause of the auditory loss and the mechanism during AD is still unknown. One hypothesis is that social isolation after hearing loss could facilitate dementia. Still, it is also believed that AD itself could cause alterations in the auditory pathway and this alteration promotes cognitive deterioration. The auditory signal is transmitted along the auditory pathway in the form of action potentials through the auditory nerve and across the

Bilateral cochlear implants (biCIs) are increasingly used to treat severe hearing loss. However, human biCI users usually exhibit relatively poor binaural cue sensitivity, with interaural time difference (ITD) sensitivity in prelingually deaf patients being particularly poor. To better understand these shortcomings in prosthetic binaural hearing, it would be helpful to know what the “innate” ITD and ILD sensitivity of the neonatally deafened (ND), mature mammalian auditory pathway is like, but this cannot easily be investigated in humans. We therefore recorded neural responses in the inferior