The Auditory Evoked Response to Stimuli Producing Periodicity Pitch

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Abstract
The cortical evoked response in man to an amplitude modulated complex sound was investigated in order to find out whether the response reflects the acoustic spectrum of the stimulus or its modulation rate. The complex sound consisted of a train of square waves repeated 200 times a second and filtered so that only the acoustic energy confined predominantly to the region of 1000 Hz was delivered to the listener. Perceptually, the pitch of this complex sound is in the neighborhood of 200 Hz.The results from 10 listeners, tested repeatedly, showed that the presence of 1000 Hz tones interposed between successive presentations of the periodic complex stimulus served to habituate the response to the latter; intervening 200 Hz tones exerted relatively little effect on the responsiveness to the periodic stimulus.These data suggest that periodicity differences in stimulation at the periphery are not converted into place differences at the level of the auditory cortex; that a low‐pitched sound is not necessarily mediated by those neural units maximally responsive to low frequency sinusoids.

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