First-spike latency of auditory neurons revisited.

The timing of the first, and sometimes only, spike of auditory neurons evoked by an acoustic stimulus depends on a variety of parameters. Recent studies have suggested that several of these dependencies originate from processes in the first synapse of the auditory system and that first-spike timing is further modified by central processing. The variation of first-spike latency with stimulus parameters contains considerable information about those parameters, as recently explored in several sensory systems. Codes based on the relative timing of first spikes in ensembles of neurons appear to be easily decodable, energetically efficient, reliable, and fast.