A tentative firing model for the auditory receptor

In 1964 Weiss published his model of the peripheral part of the auditory system. This model describes the mechanical hydraulic transfer from auricle to cochlear partition after Flanagan's (1962) model and further contains a firing model, the output of which is aimed at resembling the data obtained from single neurons in the cochlear nerve. Weiss' model can be considered as an analogous model. Siebert (e.g., 1970) and Colburn (1969) give mathematical models for the intensity functions of the non-stationary Poisson process which describes the firing pattern of each fibre of the auditory nerve. They use a more selective filter in their model and the probability of firing is chosen proportional to an exponential function of the amplitude of the stimulating signal, which for high amplitudes rapidly reaches a saturising level. As Siebert only describes the response to tone-burst stimuli, the effect of refractoriness could be left out of consideration, as the refractory interval is short compared with the mean interspike interval (~ 1 ms vs 5-10 ms). In a number of stimuli of which we want to examine the model results, the refractory mechanism might play an important part. Notably it might be possible that in response to an increasing stimulating waveform the firing rate is higher than to a decreasing one. To investigate this we choose a somewhat different scheme from that in the models mentioned above.