Frequency Domain Technique for Characterizing Nonlinearities in Biological Systems.

摘要

Response asymmetry (e.g. to light ON vs. OFF), a frequently encountered property of neurons at both peripheral and central levels in sensory pathways, can be modelled as a rectifier. We describe a double Fourier series method for obtaining the amplitudes and phases of these components for physiologically relevant neural models including (1) compressive, linear, accelerating and mixed compressive/accelerating single model neurons, (2) a cascaded series of model neurons and (3) the parallel/cascaded case corresponding to dichoptic or dichotic stimulation. If one of the inputs is held constant while the other's amplitude is varied, we obtain a family of curves-one for each component. The family of curves seems to be characteristic of the particular non-linear system. Neural models may be tested by first calculating the family of curves and then comparing these theoretical data with a physiologically measured family of curves. (jes)