NEUROSCIENCE. For the article “A unifying basis of auditory thresholds based on temporal summation,” by Peter Heil and Heinrich Neubauer, which appeared in issue 10, May 13, 2003, of Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA (100, 6151-6156; first published April 30, 2003; 10.1073/pnas.1030017100), the authors note that when they recalculated absolute thresholds in μPa·s from measurements on goldfish published by Fay and Coombs [Fay, R. R. and Coombs, S. (1983) Hearing Res. 10, 69-92] , it escaped their attention that the dB values plotted in the paper were based on a reference pressure of 1 dyne/cm2 rather than on 20 μPa. Thus, the real thresholds for the goldfish are higher than the ones plotted in black dots in Fig. 3d by a factor of 5,000. The authors point out that this error does not affect any of the conclusions, because it results only in an upward shift of the function for the goldfish in Fig. 3d. The slope m of this function also is unaffected by this difference in the reference pressure. The corrected figure and its legend appear below.
Fig. 3.
Comparison of the pressure envelope integration thresholds for neuronal (a and b) and perceptual (c and d) measurements. Shown are plots of thresholds for 5 AN fibers (a) and 5 AI neurons (b) with different CFs (different colors). Lines connect thresholds derived from tones of different SPLs but of the same onset function and onset time. (c) Analogous functions for perceptual thresholds for two cats (purple and black circles) and three humans (red, green, and blue triangles). Lines connect thresholds obtained with stimuli of different series (see Fig. 2a). (d) Analogous functions for mean perceptual thresholds for a range of vertebrate species, calculated from published data (8-14, 17-19). For the porpoise, parakeet, and field sparrow, absolute thresholds could not be determined from the original articles and thus the position on the ordinate is arbitrary.