Evoked oscillatory cortical responses are dynamically coupled to peripheral stimuli

We report that the response of neurons in rat somatosensory cortex to tactile stimulation consists of two components, a short-latency response and an oscillatory response, observable as up to 8 peaks in the post-stimulus-time-histogram with interpeak intervals in the order of 100 ms (10 Hz). While the first component is always stimulus locked, the second component is strictly stimulus-locked only when elicited from the resting state: once started, the oscillations are only weakly affected by further stimulation. This implies generally that the question of stimulus locking of oscillatory response components is not a yes/no question. Instead, the concept of dynamic coupling is shown to adequately capture the different limit cases. We present a simple dynamic model that exemplifies this point.