The response of primary horizontal semicircular canal neurons in the rat and guinea pig to angular acceleration.

In rats and guinea pigs, primary afferent neurons from the horizontal semicircular canal were divided into two categories, regular and irregular, on the basis of the regularity of their resting activity. Regular neurons tend to have higher average resting rates than irregular neurons and in response to a constant angular acceleration stimulus of 16.7 deg/s2 regular neurons tended to have lower sensitivity and longer time constants than irregular cells. Some irregular neurons are more sensitive to incremental accelerations than to decremental accelerations of the same magnitude, whereas regular neurons tend to show symmetrical sensitivity. In response to sinusoidal angular acceleration stimuli (fixed frequencies) in the range 0.01-1.5 Hz, cells which fired regularly at rest tended to have smaller gain and longer phase lag re acceleration at most frequencies than irregular cells. Transfer functions were obtained for averaged data for regular and irregular neurons separately in both species. In both species there is evidence of systematic variation between neurons within each category, and this systematic variation is obscured by averaging across neurons.