Journal of neurophysiology
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Fluctuations in the amplitude of a sound play an important role in our perception of pitch and acoustic space, but their neural analysis has not been fully elucidated. The ventral nucleus of the lateral lemniscus (VNLL) has been implicated in the processing of such temporal features of a sound. This study examines responses of neurons in the VNLL of unanesthetized rabbits to sinusoidally amplitude modulated tones, a type of stimulus that has often been used to investigate encoding of temporal information. ⋯ The best modulation frequencies of neurons with band-pass rMTFs extended from 14 to 283 Hz. The presence of neurons with band-pass rMTFs in the VNLL suggests that this nucleus plays a role in converting the temporal code for modulation frequency used in lower structures into a rate-based code for use higher in the auditory pathway. The substantial number of neurons with more complex modulation transfer functions indicates that the VNLL has other functions.