Meeting: The Association for Research in Otolaryngology MidWinter Meeting 2001 Tracking Id: 21978 Abstract Type: Contributed Abstract Author: B Suresh Krishna New York University Neural Science 809, 4 Washington Place New York, NY  USA  10003   Malcolm N Semple New York University Neural Science 809, 4 Washington Place New York, NY  USA  10003 Entered By: Suresh B. KRISHNA Preferred Track Auditory Nerve Title: A computational model for first-spike latency and variability in the auditory nerve Text: First-spike timing and variability in auditory nerve and auditory cortical responses to pure-tones depend on the stimulus rise-time and sound pressure level. Thus, cosine-squared rise functions with similar maximum accelerations of peak pressure produce similar first-spike latencies and standard deviations (Heil and Irvine 1997, J.Neurophysiology, vol 78). To elucidate the biological basis for this phenomenon, we implemented a simple, physiologically plausible model of the auditory periphery. We modeled the auditory nerve response to the onset of a pure-tone stimulus as a Poisson process driven by a function obtained by passing the stimulus through a series combination of a gammatone filter, a realistic asymmetric transducer function, and a lowpass filter. First-spike latencies and standard deviations obtained from this model (using parameters chosen from physiologically realistic ranges) were very similar to those observed in physiological studies. The results indicate that the observed dependence of latency and variability on measures like the velocity or acceleration of peak pressure can be accounted for by simple and well-understood properties of the auditory periphery.