The Department of Physiology and Biophysics, The Ruth & Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Technion, Haifa 31096, Israel.
J Neurosci. 2011 Dec 7;31(49):17811-20. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4790-11.2011.
Habituation is the most basic form of learning, yet many gaps remain in our understanding of its underlying neural mechanisms. We demonstrate that in the owl's optic tectum (OT), a single, low-level, relatively short auditory stimulus is sufficient to induce a significant reduction in the neural response to a stimulus presented up to 60 s later. This type of neural adaptation was absent in neurons from the central nucleus of the inferior colliculus and from the auditory thalamus; however, it was apparent in the OT and the forebrain entopallium. By presenting sequences that alternate between two different auditory stimuli, we show that this long-lasting adaptation is stimulus specific. The response to an odd stimulus in the sequence was not smaller than the response to the same stimulus when it was first in the sequence. Finally, we measured the habituation of reflexive eye movements and show that the behavioral habituation is correlated with the neural adaptation. The finding of a long-lasting specific adaptation in areas related to the gaze control system and not elsewhere suggests its involvement in habituation processes and opens new directions for research on mechanisms of habituation.
习惯化是最基本的学习形式，但我们对其潜在的神经机制仍知之甚少。我们证明，在猫头鹰的视顶盖（OT）中，单个、低水平、相对较短的听觉刺激足以诱导对随后 60 秒呈现的刺激的神经反应显著降低。这种类型的神经适应在中脑下丘核和听觉丘脑的神经元中不存在；然而，它在 OT 和前脑内上丘中是明显的。通过呈现两个不同听觉刺激的序列，我们表明这种持久的适应是刺激特异性的。序列中奇数刺激的反应并不小于序列中第一次出现相同刺激的反应。最后，我们测量了反射性眼球运动的习惯化，并表明行为习惯化与神经适应相关。在与凝视控制系统相关的区域中发现持久的特定适应，而在其他区域中没有发现这种适应，这表明它参与了习惯化过程，并为习惯化机制的研究开辟了新的方向。
