Topic: fine-grained temporal structure

The auditory nerve encodes sound with spike-timing that is phase locked to the fine-grained temporal structure of sound. The precision of this coding substantially exceeds that of any other sensory modality, but its role in hearing remains controversial because physiological mechanisms for extracting information from the spike timing have proven elusive. We investigated the perceptual role of auditory nerve phase locking using deep artificial neural networks in the spirit of ideal observer analysis. Neural networks took input from a simulated cochlea and were optimized for natural tasks. We ex