Bistability and the dynamics of periodically forced sensory neurons

Many neurons at the sensory periphery receive periodic input, and their activity exhibits entrainment to this input in the form of a preferred phase for firing. This article describes a modeling study of neurons which skip a random number of cycles of the stimulus between firings over a large range of input intensities. This behavior was investigated using analog and digital simulations of the motion of a particle in a double-well with noise and sinusoidal forcing. Well residence-time distributions were found to exhibit the main features of the interspike interval histograms (ISIH) measured on real sensory neurons. The conditions under which it is useful to view neurons as simple bistable systems subject to noise are examined by identifying the features of the data which are expected to arise for such systems. This approach is complementary to previous studies of such data based, e.g., on non-homogeneous point processes. Apart from looking at models which form the backbone of excitable models, our work allows us to speculate on the role that stochastic resonance, which can arise in this context, may play in the transmission of sensory information.