Species specificity and temperature dependency of temporal processing by the auditory midbrain of two species of treefrogs

The mating (advertisement) calls of two sibling species of gray treefrogs, Hyla versicolor and Hyla chrysoscelis, are spectrally identical but differ in trill rate; being higher for H. chrysoscelis. Single-unit recordings were made from the torus semicircularis of both species to investigate the neural mechanisms by which this species-specific temporal feature is analyzed. Using sinusoidally amplitude-modulated (AM) white noise as a stimulus, the temporal selectivity of these midbrain auditory neurons could be described by five response categories: 'AM nonselective' (34%); 'AM high-pass' (7%); 'AM low-pass' (6%); 'AM band-suppression' (12%); 'AM tuned' (40%). The distributions of temporal tuning values (i.e., modulation rate at which each AM-tuned unit responds maximally) are broad; in both species, neurons were found which were tuned to modulation rates greater than those found in their advertisement calls. Nevertheless, the temporal tuning values for H. versicolor (median = 25 Hz) were significantly lower than those for H. chrysoscelis (median = 32.5 Hz). The temporal selectivities of AM band-suppression neurons were found to be temperature dependent. The modulation rate at which a response minimum was observed shifted to higher values as the temperature was elevated. These results extend our earlier findings of temperature-dependent temporal selectivity in the gray treefrog. The selectivity of band-suppression and AM-tuned neurons to various rates of amplitude modulation was largely, but not completely, independent of whether sinusoidal or natural forms of AM were used.