Short-term habituation (STH) is the decrease in behavioral responding observed during repeated stimulation at regular intervals. For siphon-elicited siphon withdrawal in
(1) What are the relative contributions of intrinsic regulation of excitability and network inhibition on L29 activity during STH training?
By activating L29s with intracellular current injection, we found that intrinsic changes in excitability occur, but only at short training intervals (1 s). We also demonstrated that network inhibition is not required for regulating L29 responses during training, indicating that any expression of inhibition is redundant to the excitability changes.
(2) How does L29 synaptic plasticity contribute to the maintenance of training site-specificity exhibited in LFS MNs?
When training stimuli are delivered 1 s apart [1 s, interstimulus interval (ISI)], L29 responses decrease in both stimulated (trained) and un-stimulated (untrained) pathways, yet site-specificity of training is maintained in the LFS MNs. Our results suggest that activity-dependent synaptic facilitation (augmentation; AUG) expressed by the L29s acts to compensate for the decreased activity in the untrained pathway. First, we demonstrated that the L29-LFS synapse exhibits significant AUG with L29 activation at a 1 s ISI. Second, we showed that the induction of AUG prevents the reduction in siphon-evoked LFS responses that is otherwise observed with decreased L29 activity. Collectively, our results support a role for the L29s in regulating network dynamics during STH training, but only at rapid (1 s ISI) training intervals.