Showing papers by "Hermann Wagner published in 1992"
TL;DR: The sensitivity of auditory neurons in the barn owl's brain stem to the direction of apparent acoustic motion was studied to suggest a null-direction inhibition as one important factor of generating motion-direction sensitivity.
Abstract: 1. We studied the sensitivity of auditory neurons in the barn owl's brain stem to the direction of apparent acoustic motion. Motion stimuli were generated with an array of seven free-field speakers...
54 citations
TL;DR: It is found that the barn owl's accommodation was symmetrical in both eyes, with no regard to the power of the lens used, and pupillary responses to light were independent.
25 citations
01 Jan 1992-Journal of Comparative Physiology A-neuroethology Sensory Neural and Behavioral Physiology
TL;DR: The ability of neurons in the barn owl's inferior colliculus to sense brief appearances of interaural time difference (ITD), the main cue for azimuthal sound localization in this species, is investigated as evidence for neuronal convergence within the pathway computing ITD.
Abstract: This paper investigates the ability of neurons in the barn owl's (Tyto alba) inferior colliculus to sense brief appearances of interaural time difference (ITD), the main cue for azimuthal sound localization in this species. In the experiments, ITD-tuning was measured during presentation of a mask-probe-mask sequence. The probe consisted of a noise having a constant ITD, while the mask consisted of binaurally uncorrelated noise. Collicular neurons discriminated between the probe and masking noise by showing rapid changes from untuned to tuned and back to untuned responses. The curve describing the relation between probe duration and the degree of ITD-tuning resembled a leaky-integration process with a time constant of about 2 ms. Many neurons were ITD-tuned when probe duration was below 1 ms. These extremely short effective probe durations are interpreted as evidence for neuronal convergence within the pathway computing ITD. The minimal probe duration necessary for ITD-tuning was independent of the bandwidth of the neurons' frequency tuning and also of the best frequency of a neuron. Many narrowly tuned neurons having different best frequencies converge to form a broad-band neuron. To yield the short effective probe durations the convergence must occur in strong temporal synchronism.
17 citations