Contributions of Intrinsic Neural and Stimulus Variance to Binaural Sensitivity

The discrimination of a change in a stimulus is determined both by the magnitude of that change and by the variability in the neural response to the stimulus. When the stimulus is itself noisy, then the relative contributions of the neural (intrinsic) and stimulus induced variability becomes a critical question. We measured the contribution of intrinsic neural noise and interstimulus variability to the discrimination of interaural time differences (ITDs) and interaural correlation (IAC). We measured discharge rate versus characteristic frequency (CF) tone ITD functions, and CF-centered narrowband noise ITD and IAC functions in interleaved blocks in the same units in the inferior colliculus of urethane-anesthetized guinea pigs. Ten “frozen” tokens of noise were synthesized and the responses to each token were separately analyzed to allow the relative contributions of intrinsic and stimulus variability to be assessed. ITD and IAC discrimination thresholds were determined for a simulated two-interval forced-choice experiment, based on the firing rate distributions, using receiver operating characteristic analysis. On average, between stimulus variability contributed 19% (range, 1.5–30%) of the variance in noise ITD discrimination and 27% (range, 3–50%) in IAC discrimination. Noise ITD thresholds were slightly higher than tone ITD thresholds. Taking the mean of the thresholds for individual noise tokens gave a similar result to pooling across all noise tokens. This implies that although the stimulus induced variability is measurable, it is insignificant in relation to the intrinsic noise in ITD and IAC discrimination.