#12: Thirty rats (350-450 g) of the Sprague-Dawley strain (Hilltop Labs, Scottsdale, PA) were anesthetized with urethan (1.5?g/kg; Sigma) and placed in a stereotaxic apparatus. The body temperature of the rat was kept constant by a small animal thermoregulation device. The scalp was removed, and a small (1.2?×?1.2?mm) bone window was drilled above the hippocampus (centered at AP?=?3.5 and L?=?2.5?mm from bregma) for extra- and intracellular recordings. A pair of stimulating electrodes (100??m each, with 0.5-mm tip separation) were inserted into the left fimbria-fornix (AP?=?1.3, L?=?1.0,?V?=?3.95) to stimulate the commissural inputs. Extracellular and intracellular electrodes were mounted on two separate manipulators on opposite sides of a Kopf stereotaxic apparatus. The horizontal axes of the two manipulators were parallel. The manipulator of the extracellular electrode was mounted at a 10° angle from vertical to permit the subsequent placement of the intracellular electrode. The optimal distance between the electrodes at the brain surface to cause the tips to arrive at the same point at the level of the hippocampus (2?mm deep) was calculated to be ~370 ?m. The extracellular electrode was lowered into the cell body layer of CA1 by monitoring for the presence of unit activity and evoked field potentials. Once the intracellular and extracellular electrode tips were placed in the brain, the bone window was covered by a mixture of paraffin (50%) and paraffin oil (50%) to prevent drying of the brain and decrease pulsation. The intracellular micropipette was then advanced into the region near the extracellular electrode, and an intracellular recording from a CA1 pyramidal cell was obtained. If no extracellular and intracellular pairs were encountered after advancing the micropipette through the CA1 pyramidal layer and stratum radiatum, the intracellular electrode was withdrawn, and a new intracellular electrode track was made from the cortical surface.
#37: Figure 8. Stimuli used to evoke auditory steady-state responses. This figure shows various types of stimuli that have been used to evoke the auditory steady-state responses. The stimulus waveforms are plotted in the time domain on the left, and the spectra of the stimuli (based on a much longer time sample) are shown on the right. These data were obtained by calculation; electric and acoustic waveforms would be basically similar, with some filtering effects during passage through the signal generators and transducers. The TONES represent brief tone-bursts of 1000 Hz with the commonly used 2-1-2 envelope, with rise and fall times of two cycles (2 ms) and a plateau of 1 cycle (1 ms). The spectrum shows a broad splatter of energy into frequencies far removed from the nominal frequency of the tone. The BEATS were obtained by adding together continuous tones of 958 and 1042 Hz. The sinusoidally amplitude-modulated (SAM) tone used a carrier of 1000 Hz and a modulation frequency of 84 Hz. There are spectral peaks at the carrier frequency and at one sideband above and below the carrier, separated from it by the modulation frequency. The SIN? tone used a modulation envelope based on the third power of the usual sinusoidal envelope (John et al, 2002a). The spectrum contains three sidebands on either side of the carrier. The FM tone is sinusoidally modulated with a depth of modulation of 25%. The MM tone has mixed modulation (100% AM and 25% FM), with both modulations occurring at 84 Hz. The bottom set of data represent independent amplitude and frequency modulation or IAFM, with 50% amplitude modulation at 84 Hz and 25% frequency modulation at 98 Hz. The spectrum shows a complex set of peak but all the energy remains concentrated around 1000 Hz. All the time waveforms are plotted so that they have the same peak amplitude. The spectra are plotted logarithmically over a range of 50 dB relative to the maximum peak in the spectrum.
#38: Figure 1. Exponential envelopes. The left column of the figure
shows the exponential envelopes used in this study. The
middle column shows the slope of the envelope and the third
column shows the acceleration of the envelope. The maxima
for both slope and acceleration occur at a later latency as the
power of the exponential envelope increases (indicated by
the arrowheads). The right column shows the spectrum of the
envelope signal (left column), plotted using a linear scale, at
twice the size of the time signal in the left column. The
amplitude at 0 Hz, which indicates the offset of the signal,
increases with increasing N. In addition the amplitudes at the
harmonics of fm increase with N > 1.