Individualized Assays of Temporal Coding in the Ascending Human Auditory System

Neural phase-locking to temporal fluctuations is a fundamental and unique mechanism by which acoustic information is encoded by the auditory system. The perceptual role of this metabolically expensive mechanism, the neural phase-locking to temporal fine structure (TFS) in particular, is debated. Although hypothesized, it is unclear whether auditory perceptual deficits in certain clinical populations are attributable to deficits in TFS coding. Efforts to uncover the role of TFS have been impeded by the fact that there are no established assays for quantifying the fidelity of TFS coding at the individual level. While many candidates have been proposed, for an assay to be useful, it should not only intrinsically depend on TFS coding, but should also have the property that individual differences in the assay reflect TFS coding per se over and beyond other sources of variance. Here, we evaluate a range of behavioral and electroencephalogram (EEG)-based measures as candidate individualized measures of TFS sensitivity. Our comparisons of behavioral and EEG-based metrics suggest that extraneous variables dominate both behavioral scores and EEG amplitude metrics, rendering them ineffective. After adjusting behavioral scores using lapse rates, and extracting latency or percent-growth metrics from EEG, interaural timing sensitivity measures exhibit robust behavior-EEG correlations. Together with the fact that unambiguous theoretical links can be made relating binaural measures and phase-locking to TFS, our results suggest that these adjusted binaural assays may be well suited for quantifying individual TFS processing.

Automated summary

Neural phase-locking is a fundamental mechanism for encoding acoustic information, but its role in perception is still debatable. Existing methods lack the ability to quantify individual levels of temporal fine structure (TFS) coding. This study compared behavioral and EEG-based measures and found that external factors significantly influenced the results. However, after adjusting behavioral scores and extracting latency or growth metrics from EEG, measures of interaural timing sensitivity showed strong behavior-EEG correlations.