FIG. 7.

Simulation with the extended model produced cough-like motor patterns. The simulated activities of phrenic, lumbar, and laryngeal motoneurons and functionally antecedent VRC and pontine neuron populations were similar to those observed in vivo. A fiber population consisting of 100 fibers, each with 100 excitatory synaptic terminals (see legend, Table A3 of the appendix) with a synaptic strength of 0.02 was used to represent cough receptor excitation; each fiber had a firing probability of 0.05 at each simulation time step. This fiber population excited a second-order “cough” neuron population (Fig. 4); see Table A7 (appendix) for properties of the cough population, Table A8 (appendix) for details of connections with other populations, and the text for further details.