Decoupling the level dependence of the basilar membrane gain and phase in nonlinear cochlea models.

In animal experiments, the strong dependence on stimulus level of the basilar membrane gain and tuning is not matched by a corresponding change in the phase slope in the resonant region. Linear models, in which the gain dependence on the stimulus level has to be schematized by explicitly changing the tuning parameters of the resonant model, do not easily match this feature of the experimental data. Nonlinear models predict a phase slope that is relatively decoupled from tuning. In addition, delayed-stiffness and feed-forward models also show a significant intrinsic decoupling between gain and tuning, which helps in matching the experimental data.