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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America logoLink to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
. 1995 Apr 11;92(8):3362–3366. doi: 10.1073/pnas.92.8.3362

Habituation of an invertebrate escape reflex due to modulation by higher centers rather than local events.

F B Krasne 1, T M Teshiba 1
PMCID: PMC42166  PMID: 7724567

Abstract

Learning is widely thought to result from altered potency of synapses within the neural pathways that mediate the learned behavior. Support for this belief, which pervades current physiological and computational thinking, comes especially from the analysis of cases of simple learning in invertebrates. Here, evidence is presented that in one such case, habituation of crayfish escape, the learning is more due to onset of tonic descending inhibition than to the intrinsic depression of circuit synapses to which it was previously attributed. Thus, the altered performance seems to depend at least as much on events in higher centers as on local plasticity.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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