Sensory neurons can respond to dynamic stimuli with temporally precise firing events. In the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) of the thalamus, we found previously that when a flickering visual stimulus was repeated, individual cells fired action potentials at the same time in every trial to within 1 msec. We now show that these precise firing events are also reproducible across cells of the same class. Therefore, the mechanisms for producing precise timing must be conserved within a cell class.

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... Our results further suggest that cortical neurons would require only a few generic processing mechanisms to extract the fine temporal information available in their LGN inputs.