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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

This article has been cited by other articles:

				A. BERKOWITZ, E. T. VU, and F. B. KRASNE Specificity of Neural Circuits that Inhibit Escape in Crayfish Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci., November 16, 1998; 860(1): 461 - 463. [Full Text] [PDF]

				D. H. Edwards, S.-R. Yeh, and F. B. Krasne Neuronal coincidence detection by voltage-sensitive electrical synapses PNAS, June 9, 1998; 95(12): 7145 - 7150. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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