Relevance of the single ommatidium performance in determining the oscillatory response of the Limulus lateral eye

The response of a healthy lateral eye of Limulus to constant, uniform and sufficiently intense light stimulation, consists of a sustained oscillatory discharge, all ommatidia firing synchronously in bursts, at intervals of about 0.2 s (Barlow and Fraioli, 1978). This response has been analysed by a computer simulation, where the performance of the single unit is described by encoder models of the integrate-and-fire type, already extensively investigated. The results obtained show that the occurrence and the time features of the oscillatory response depend on the neural models adopted.