Event:

The detection of sounds in quiet is among the simplest tasks performed by the auditory system. Thresholds for sounds in quiet decrease with increasing sound duration in every species studied. The neural mechanisms underlying this trade-off, often referred to as temporal integration, are not fully understood.

I will summarize our work and thinking on this topic which is at variance with current thinking in various related fields. We have probed the human auditory system with a challenging set of tone stimuli differing in duration, shape of the temporal amplitude envelope, duration of silent gaps between bursts, and frequency, and also analyzed published data. We propose a psychologically and physiologically plausible probabilistic model and show that it accurately accounts for the results and does so considerably better than existing models in the literature. The model assumes that sensory events are generated by a Poisson point process, at a low rate in the absence of stimulation and at higher rates in the presence of stimulation. The increase in rate caused by stimulation is proportional to the time-varying amplitude envelope of the bandpass-filtered signal raised to an exponent. We find the exponent to be ~3, challenging models in which stimulus intensity is assumed to be the relevant physical quantity for the auditory system. The possible origin of the exponent and potential consequences of sensorineural hearing loss are discussed.