Variability in spike trains during constant and dynamic stimulation.

In a recent study, it was concluded that natural time-varying stimuli are represented more reliably in the brain than constant stimuli are. The results presented here disagree with this conclusion, although they were obtained from the same identified neuron (H1) in the fly's visual system. For large parts of the neuron's activity range, the variability of the responses was very similar for constant and time-varying stimuli and was considerably smaller than that in many visual interneurons of vertebrates.