Abstract
The perceptual salience of a target tone presented in a multitone background is increased by the presentation of a precursor sound consisting of the multitone background alone. It has been proposed that this “enhancement” phenomenon results from an effective amplification of the neural response to the target tone. In this study, we tested this hypothesis in humans, by comparing the auditory steady-state response (ASSR) to a target tone that was enhanced by a precursor sound with the ASSR to a target tone that was not enhanced. In order to record neural responses originating in the brainstem, the ASSR was elicited by amplitude modulating the target tone at a frequency close to 80 Hz. The results did not show evidence of an amplified neural response to enhanced tones. In a control condition, we measured the ASSR to a target tone that, instead of being perceptually enhanced by a precursor sound, was acoustically increased in level. This level increase matched the magnitude of enhancement estimated psychophysically with a forward masking paradigm in a previous experimental phase. We found that the ASSR to the tone acoustically increased in level was significantly greater than the ASSR to the tone enhanced by the precursor sound. Overall, our results suggest that the enhancement effect cannot be explained by an amplified neural response at the level of the brainstem. However, an alternative possibility is that brainstem neurons with enhanced responses do not contribute to the scalp-recorded ASSR.
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Notes
Viemeister and Bacon (1982) referred to the phenomenon as “adaptation of suppression,” suggesting that what was adapting was cochlear suppression. However, in the same paper, the authors also speculated that the adaptation could be occurring in the central nervous system. By using the phrase “adaptation of inhibition,” we refer here to this second hypothesis. Although cochlear suppression may “adapt” through the action of the medial olivo-cochlear efferent reflex (MOCR) (Strickland 2004), its involvement in the enhancement effect remains unclear because of the lack of response enhancement at the level of the auditory nerve (Palmer et al.1995), as well as the presence of enhancement effects in cochlear implant listeners (Wang et al. 2012).
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Thierry Lafon for technical help in the setup of the EEG apparatus. We also thank the Associate Editor and two anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. This work was supported by grants from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (LEAP, AMUSIA).
Conflict of Interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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Carcagno, S., Plack, C.J., Portron, A. et al. The Auditory Enhancement Effect is Not Reflected in the 80-Hz Auditory Steady-State Response. JARO 15, 621–630 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10162-014-0455-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10162-014-0455-y