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Spike-Frequency Adaptation and Intrinsic Properties of an Identified, Looming-Sensitive Neuron

¹Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine; ²Computational and Applied Mathematics, Rice University, Houston, Texas; ³Department of Zoology, Cambridge University, Cambridge; and ⁴Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom

Submitted 23 January 2006; accepted in final form 5 March 2006

We investigated in vivo the characteristics of spike-frequency adaptation and the intrinsic membrane properties of an identified, looming-sensitive interneuron of the locust optic lobe, the lobula giant movement detector (LGMD). The LGMD had an input resistance of 4–5 M, a membrane time constant of about 8 ms, and exhibited inward rectification and rebound spiking after hyperpolarizing current pulses. Responses to depolarizing current pulses revealed the neuron's intrinsic bursting properties and pronounced spike-frequency adaptation. The characteristics of adaptation, including its time course, the attenuation of the firing rate, the mutual dependency of these two variables, and their dependency on injected current, closely followed the predictions of a model first proposed to describe the adaptation of cat visual cortex pyramidal neurons in vivo. Our results thus validate the model in an entirely different context and suggest that it might be applicable to a wide variety of neurons across species. Spike-frequency adaptation is likely to play an important role in tuning the LGMD and in shaping the variability of its responses to visual looming stimuli.

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