Volume 17, Number 22,
Issue of November 15, 1997
pp. 8867-8879
Postexcitatory Inhibition of the Crayfish Lateral Giant Neuron: A
Mechanism for Sensory Temporal Filtering
Received May 14, 1997; revised Aug. 21, 1997; accepted Aug. 28, 1997.
Eric T. Vu,
Ari Berkowitz, and
Franklin B. Krasne
Department of Psychology, Neuroscience Program, and the
Brain Research Institute, University of California, Los Angeles,
California 90024
Crayfish escape from threats by either giant neuron-mediated
"reflex" tail flexions that occur with very little delay but do not
allow for much sensory guidance of trajectory or by "nongiant" tail
flexion responses that allow for sensory guidance but occur much less
promptly. Thus, when a stimulus occurs, the nervous system must make a
rapid assessment of whether to use the faster reflex system or the
slower nongiant one. It does this on the basis of the abruptness of
stimulus onset; only stimuli of very abrupt onset trigger
giant-mediated responses. We report here that stimuli which excite the
lateral giant (LG) command neurons for one form of reflex escape also
produce a slightly delayed postexcitatory inhibition
(PEI) of the command neurons. As a result, only stimuli that become
strong enough to excite the command neurons to firing threshold before
the onset of PEI, within a few milliseconds of stimulus onset, can
cause giant-mediated responses. This inhibition is directed to distal
dendrites of the LG neurons, which allows for some location specificity
of PEI within the sensory field of a single hemisegment.
Key words:
postexcitatory inhibition;
feed-forward inhibition;
crayfish;
lateral giant;
escape;
distal inhibition;
dendritic
integration;
temporal filtering