Location-specific components of the gross cochlear action potential: an assessment of the validity of the high-pass masking technique by cochlear nerve fibre recording in the cat.

The auditory high-pass masking technique has been used in attempts to define the origin, along the cochlear partition, of the gross cochlear action potential (CAP) and the gross brain stem potential. Theoretically, the high-pass masking paradigm should be frequency and location specific at the cochlear level, and some indirect evidence does point to this specificity. However, this hypothesis has not yet been directly substantiated. In the present experiment, click-evoked cochlear nerve activity was recorded simultaneously from the round window and from single fibres of the cochlear nerve, with and without high-pass maskers spaced in octaves from 0.5 to 16 kHz, at three intensities, in the anaesthetized cat. The "derived' CAPs were computed and compared with the mapping of single cochlear fibre responses under the same conditions. With one main exception, the conclusions drawn on the origin of the frequency components of the "derived' potentials were found to be valid in the normal cat. The exception concerned fibres with characteristic frequencies below 1-2 kHz, where the substantial spread towards the high frequencies of their frequency threshold curves, and the effects of lateral suppression or of other "remote masking' phenomena rendered the high-pass masking less location specific. From these results and certain assumptions, we would predict the high-pass masking technique to be valid in electrophysiological investigations in normal humans for frequencies down to 0.5-1 kHz.