Stability of neural firing in the trigeminal nuclei under mechanical whisker stimulation

Sensory information handling is an essentially nonstationary process even under a periodic stimulation. We show how the time evolution of ridges in the wavelet spectrum of spike trains can be used for quantification of the dynamical stability of the neuronal responses to a stimulus. We employ this method to study neuronal responses in trigeminal nuclei of the rat provoked by tactile whisker stimulation. Neurons from principalis (Pr5) and interpolaris (Sp5i) show the maximal stability at the intermediate (50 ms) stimulus duration, whereas Sp5o cells "prefer" shorter (10 ms) stimulation. We also show that neurons in all three nuclei can perform as stimulus frequency filters. The response stability of about 33% of cells exhibits low-pass frequency dynamics. About 57% of cells have band-pass dynamics with the optimal frequency at 5 Hz for Pr5 and Sp5i, and 4 Hz for Sp5o, and the remaining 10% show no prominent dependence on the stimulus frequency. This suggests that the neural coding scheme in trigeminal nuclei is not fixed, but instead it adapts to the stimulus characteristics.