Eliciting audio evoked potentials using continuous stimuli

Abstract

Noise input signals are commonly used in both linear and non-linear system identification of physiological systems. This method can be applied to electrophysiological analysis of the human auditory system by controlling the modulation of the amplitude of a sound stimulus using a pre- computed noise signal. In this study we describe how one can obtain an estimate of the linear response of the auditory system using noise signals and we compare it to a standard auditory evoked potential (AEP). Two different noise modulated sounds are tested, broadband noise (BBN) and a 2kHz tone. Results show that the BBN is better at eliciting notable responses. Results also show that although the SNR of the proposed response to the modulated BBN is generally lower than the standard AEP the two responses do correlate well suggesting that the spread spectrum stimulus is a valid method for elicitation of an AEP.