Fig. 2: Different stimulus durations produce qualitatively different response terminations.

A Representative voltage traces in response to 20 ms, 200 ms, and 2 s stimuli. B Firing responses of the ORNs to stimuli of different durations. Colored lines represent the responses of individual neurons. The black line is the average response across all recorded neurons (the shaded area indicates the stimulus period, N = 21–23 sensilla). C Raster plots of the spike trains, aligned at the stimulus offset. Responses to stimuli of 100 ms and shorter continue after the stimulus offset, while the ends of responses to longer stimuli coincide with the stimulus offset. The red vertical line represents the point in time when 50% of the ORNs' responses finished (see “Materials and methods”). D Box-plot of how much the response ends exceeded the stimulus duration. The stimulus duration is color-coded, the same as in (B). E Raster plots aligned to the median response end. We compared the firing rates in the red-filled area (0.1–0.4 s after the response end) to the firing rates in the green-filled area (1–3 s after the response end) to evaluate the contrast between the inhibitory phase and the rebound activity, as shown in (F) (top panel: firing rate during inhibitory/rebound phase, bottom panel: the difference between the rebound and inhibitory activity; stars indicate Wilcoxon rank test significance levels *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001, see the main text for test statistics and p-values).