Prepulse inhibition of the startle eyeblink as an indicator of temporal summation

Effects of prepulse intensity, duration, and bandwidth on perceived intensity of startling acoustic stimuli

“…not at extreme values). A previous study (Blumenthal 1995) demonstrated the importance of prepulse but not gap duration in determining the amount of PPI, and used brief prepulse pairs to show that the effects of prepulse duration may be best accounted for by brief onset and offset transients. Similar mechanisms have not been tested with PPIPSI, but might be predicted based on the fact that some gap appears to be necessary for the measurement of PPIPSI.…”

“…In the present study, we assessed the relationship between PPIPSI and prepulse intensity, duration, and bandwidth. To the extent that PPIPSI provides information similar to that found with PPI of startle, we expected increased PPIPSI as prepulse intensity or duration increased to some asymptote (Blumenthal, 1995(Blumenthal, ,1996, and greater PPIPSI with broadband noise prepulses than with pure tone prepulses (Wynn et al, 2000).…”

On the influence of baseline startle reactivity on the indexation of prepulse inhibition.

“…In contrast to other intensively studied parameters in PPI, such as lead stimulus interval (Hoffman and Ison 1980), stimulus modality (Koch 1999), prepulse intensity (Blumenthal 1995;Graham and Murray 1977), pulse-alone intensity Yee et al 2005), and the effect of background noise level (Blumenthal et al 2006;Flaten et al 2005), the impact of baseline startle reactivity on PPI is less understood, and the independence of the two measures remains to be directly tested.…”

Inhibition of acoustic startle using different mechanoreceptive channels

“…Greater inhibition of startle has been shown to correlate with more complete processing of the lead stimulus or prepulse (Norris & Blumenthal, 1996). PPI is the result of the activation of a transient detection system with a narrow window of temporal summation (up to 50 msec; Blumenthal, 1995). The distinction between transient and sustained stimulus processing is analogous to the distinction between stimulus detection and stimulus identification, with these fundamental information processing stages depending on distinct underlying neuronal systems (Blumenthal, 1995;Gersuni et al, 1971).…”

“…PPI is the result of the activation of a transient detection system with a narrow window of temporal summation (up to 50 msec; Blumenthal, 1995). The distinction between transient and sustained stimulus processing is analogous to the distinction between stimulus detection and stimulus identification, with these fundamental information processing stages depending on distinct underlying neuronal systems (Blumenthal, 1995;Gersuni et al, 1971). PPI is believed to be due to the activation of rapidly summating neurons that preferentially process transient aspects of a stimulus (change detectors; Blumenthal, 1999;Graham, 1992).…”