Precise Firing Events Are Conserved across Neurons

Pamela Reinagel and R. Clay Reid

J. Neurosci. (2002) 22(16):6837–6841

Sensory neurons can respond to dynamic stimuli with temporally precise firing events. In the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) of the thalamus, we found previously that when a flickering visual stimulus was repeated, individual cells fired action potentials at the same time in every trial to within 1 msec. We now show that these precise firing events are also reproducible across cells of the same class. Therefore, the mechanisms for producing precise timing must be conserved within a cell class. Our results further suggest that cortical neurons would require only a few generic processing mechanisms to extract the fine temporal information available in their LGN inputs.

Precise firing events happen at the same times in different cells A, Responses of an LGN neuron (ON-center X cell) to 128 repeats of the same dynamic visual stimulus. Each row represents a single trial, with each action potential represented by a single point; the horizontal axis represents time (the first 500 msec of an 8 sec trial is shown; the time axis is shared with B and C). B, Responses of another ON-center X cell to the same stimulus, recorded in a different animal. C, Luminance time course of the visual stimulus (Stim) for the responses shown in A and B.
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