Prediction of the responses of auditory neurons in the midbrain of the grass frog based on the spectro-temporal receptive field.

The spectro-temporal receptive field (STRF) of an auditory neuron represents those characteristics of the sound stimulus in both the time and frequency domain that affect the firing probability of the neuron. The STRF is determined under stationary stimulus conditions for Gaussian wide-band noise. It has been demonstrated that for some neurons the response to that noise could to a considerable extent be derived from the STRF. In the present study the usefulness of the STRF is tested to predict responses to other stimuli such as noise with different frequency content and to species-specific vocalisations. It appears that the predicted response to vocalisations is at best in qualitative agreement with the actual response.