PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Douglas L. Oliver
AU  - Gretchen E. Beckius
AU  - Deborah C. Bishop
AU  - William C. Loftus
AU  - Ranjan Batra
TI  - Topography of Interaural Temporal Disparity Coding in Projections of Medial Superior Olive to Inferior Colliculus
AID  - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.23-19-07438.2003
DP  - 2003 Aug 13
TA  - The Journal of Neuroscience
PG  - 7438--7449
VI  - 23
IP  - 19
4099  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/23/19/7438.short
4100  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/23/19/7438.full
SO  - J. Neurosci.2003 Aug 13; 23
AB  - Neurons in the medial superior olive encode interaural temporal disparity, and their receptive fields indicate the location of a sound source in the azimuthal plane. It is often assumed that the projections of these neurons transmit the receptive field information about azimuth from point to point, much like the projections of the retina to the brain transmit the position of a visual stimulus. Yet this assumption has never been verified. Here, we use physiological and anatomical methods to examine the projections of the medial superior olive to the inferior colliculus for evidence of a spatial topography that would support transmission of azimuthal receptive fields. The results show that this projection does not follow a simple point-to-point topographical map of receptive field location. Thus, the representation of sound location along the azimuth in the inferior colliculus most likely relies on a complex, nonlinear map.