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Journal of Neuroscience, Vol 14, 1366-1384, Copyright © 1994 by Society for Neuroscience
Consistency in nervous systems: trial-to-trial and animal-to-animal variations in the responses to repeated applications of a sensory stimulus in Aplysia
JY Wu, Y Tsau, HP Hopp, LB Cohen, AC Tang and CX Falk
Department of Physiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut 06510.
What is the internal noise in a nervous system? We studied this question by
determining the trial-to-trial consistency of the neuronal response in the
abdominal ganglion of Aplysia californica. Because our voltage-sensitive
dye recordings detected the spike activity from a large fraction of the
neurons in the ganglion, these results provide a reasonably complete
characterization of the consistency of the response to a sensory stimulus.
The consistency of each neuron was evaluated by the number and timing of
spikes in the response. The variability in the spike count was described
using the coefficient of variation. The spike count variations follow a
Poisson distribution, indicating that most of these variations were the
result of a random process. For each neuron the reliability of the response
to touch was measured in two ways; both measures indicated a broad
distribution of reliabilities within the neuron population. The time of the
maximum response also varied substantially in some animals. These timing
variations were in part due to random processes and in part due to
systematic effects (changes in activity of many neurons that were highly
correlated). The time course of the activity of individual neurons was
compared with the time course of the gill withdrawal. In some animals the
activity of individual neurons was only poorly correlated with the
behavior; in contrast, the summed activity of groups of neurons matched the
behavior quite well. This implies that the behavioral output of the system
may be a distributed combination of the activity of many neurons. The
differences between animals were substantially larger than the trial-to-
trial differences in one animal. The responses made by different
preparations differed along many dimensions.
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