Octopus cells in the posteroventral cochlear nucleus exhibit characteristic onset responses to broad band transients but are little investigated in response to more complex sound stimuli. In this paper, we propose a phenomenological, but biophysically motivated, modeling approach that allows to simulate responses of large populations of octopus cells to arbitrary sound pressure waves. The model depends on only few parameters and reproduces basic physiological characteristics like onset firing and phase locking to amplitude modulations. Simulated responses to speech stimuli suggest that octopus cells are particularly sensitive to high-frequency transients in natural sounds and their sustained firing to phonemes provides a population code for sound level.

后腹耳蜗核中的章鱼细胞对宽带瞬变表现出特征性的起始反应，但很少研究对更复杂的声音刺激的反应。在本文中，我们提出了一种现象学但受生物物理学驱动的建模方法，该方法允许模拟大量章鱼细胞对任意声压波的响应。该模型仅依赖于很少的参数，并再现了基本的生理特征，例如起始触发和相位锁定到幅度调制。对语音刺激的模拟反应表明，章鱼细胞对自然声音中的高频瞬变特别敏感，它们对音素的持续发射提供了声音水平的种群代码。