A neural model of biased oscillations in Aplysia head-waving behavior

A long-term bias in the head-waving behavior of Aplysia can be induced using bright lights as an aversive stimulus: coupling onset of the lights with head movements to one side results in a bias away from that side (Cook & Carew, 1986). This bias has been interpreted as a form of operant conditioning, whereby theAplysia learns the adverse effect of its own actions. A similar form of head-waving behavior was previously modeled by Raymond, Baxter, Buonomano, and Byrne (1992) using a neural oscillator. In this article we simulate the head-waving behavior using a recurrent gated dipole, a nonlinear dynamical neural model that has previously beenused to explain various data including oscillatory behavior in biological pacemakers. Our model has generated quantitative fits to the experimental data of Cook and Carew (1986), and it has suggested a new experimental hypothesis on the nature of the head-waving behavior.