Phenomenological model for two-tone suppression

Abstract

A model relating discharge rate in single auditory nerve fibers to parameters of a 2-tone stimulus was presented. Cases were considered where 1 tone is at fiber characteristic frequency (CF) and the other tone produces 2-tone suppression. The last stage in the model was a saturating nonlinearity. For the CF tone presented alone, the input to this nonlinearity was the CF amplitude; in the 2-tone case, the CF amplitude was attenuated by a factor which depended only on the suppressor-tone amplitude and frequency. The model served to relate a number of 2-tone studies. In particular, it predicted the recently reported differences in 2-tone suppression for the cases of suppressor frequencies above and below fiber CF.