The human auditory system decomposes complex sounds into distinct components via a collection of processing steps. Knowing whether Spiral Ganglion Cells (SGCs) play an active role in the decoding of complex sounds can facilitate the development of Cochlear Implant (Cl) coding strategies and clinical assessment tools. Early animal studies reported SGCs being similar across different characteristic frequencies (CFs). In this study, human electrically evoked compound action potentials (eCAPs) were analysed to probe the relationship between the reciprocal of CF and the duration of the eCAP. A significant relationship could indicate that SGCs may not simply be passive cables. eCAP datasets from 6 published studies (175 Cl users, 1243 recordings) were analysed and their peaks were automatically labelled. The nlp2 latency was derived for each recording as a proxy of the action potential duration. The CF of each recording was estimated by mapping the average insertion angle of the electrode to the human SGC map. A weak but statistically significant relationship was observed between the n1p2 latency and the reciprocal of CF (random-effects model with random intercepts for subject, r = 0.09, p = 0.024, n= 450) supporting the hypothesis that lower CF is associated with slower repolarisation (longer n1p2 latency) in human spiral ganglion cells.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

J.L. was supported by a joint scholarship provided by the Ministry of Education, Taiwan and Cambridge Commonwealth, European, and International Trust. C.G. was supported by MRC Impact Acceleration Award No. G116517. DV was funded by Medical Research Council MR/S002537/1, NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre NIHR203312, and NIHR Programme Grant for Applied Research NIHR201608.

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