Auditory flutter fusion in patients with cortical ablations.

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Abstract
White noise is a complex acoustic stimulus containing all audible frequencies at equal energy levels. It may be rapidly interrupted to give rise to a sensation of flutter below a critical rate and to a sensation of continuous noise above that rate. It is regarded as an auditory analogue of critical flicker frequency in vision. A method for rapidly determining the fusion threshold for interrupted white noise in naive normal subjects and brain injured patients is described. A lowered auditory flutter fusion threshold has been found in patients with unilateral surgical ablations of cerebral cortical tissue. The degree of impairment appears to be constant for the several loci of cortical lesion studied. A coefficient of correlation of 0.43 was obtained between successive measurements of visual flicker fusion and auditory flutter fusion in 32 normal individuals. The hypothesis is advanced that the cause of the lowered fusion threshold in the brain injured patients is a minimal loss in differential sensitivity to intensity of white noise.

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