Modification of eyelid conditioning timing induced by amplitude-modulated tone and its theoretical interpretation

  • Takeru Honda (RIKEN BSI Lab for Motor Learning Control / JSPS Research Fellow(PD))
  • Moritoshi Hirono (RIKEN BSI Lab for Motor Learning Control)
  • Tadashi Yamazaki (University of Electro-communications)
  • Soichi Nagao (RIKEN BSI Lab for Motor Learning Control)

Timing is one of important aspects in motor control. In eyelid conditioning, repetition of pairing a tone (conditioned stimulus, CS) and airpuff promotes the acquisition of precisely timed eye-closure (conditioned response, CR) to only CS. Our behavioral study on rabbits reveals that when the amplitude-modulated (AM) tone was used for CS during training, the CR timing after the completion of conditioning was modulated by the magnitude of maximum amplitude of AM tone used for CS. These observations are consistent with the prediction of our theoretical study that the CR timing depends on the change of passage-of-time information represented by cerebellar granule cell activity.
Last-modified: 2012-12-18 (火) 15:56:32