Synaptic mechanisms underlying temporally precise information processing in the VNLL

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Neurons in the ventral part of the ventral nucleus of the lateral lemniscus (VNLL) show highly precise temporal discharge patterns with high firing rates and low latencies upon monaural (contralateral) stimulation with amplitude-modulated sounds. Therefore they are believed to play an important role in the processing of conspecific vocalization such as human speech. In this project we evaluate the hypothesis that the markedly biphasic shape of these neurons' excitatory synaptic currents is a key feature in understanding their response properties. To this end, we will quantitatively describe the synaptic dynamics of the afferent synapses and study the supra-threshold integration of these currents using a combination of electrophysiological recordings and a computational model of these neurons. Finally, we will quantify the information transfer and stimulus discriminability of the response patterns using conductance trains derived from human speech signals in experiments and model.