Modeling the Effects of Hearing Loss on Neural Re- sponses in the Cochlear Nucleus

This thesis is dedicated Mr. Gary Gran. Physiological studies of neurons in the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DC) and vent ral cochlear nucleus (VCN) performed by Ma and Young (2006) and Cai et al. (2008), respectively, showed the changes in response properties that arise following acoustic trauma. A model of the auditory periphery by Zilany and Bruce (2007) , capable of modeling the effects of acoustic trauma on auditory nerve (AN) fib er responses, was used to simulate inputs to computational models of DCI and VCI cells in order to determine if the changes shown by Cai et al. (2008) and Ma and Young (2006) could be fully explained by changes in the auditory periphery. DCN cells simulated using the Zheng and Voigt (2006) DCN model receiving AN inputs from an impaired auditory periphery were able to reproduce many of t he types of responses shown by Ma and Young (2006). Providing impaired AN inputs wit h compound action potential (CAP) threshold shifts beginning just above DCN cell best frequency (BF) were able to reproduce the tail responses reported by Ma an