A variant of the integrate-and-fire model to simulate the adaptive neural firing pattern

The integrate-and-fire (IF) based modeling technique has been long employed to study the neural firing activities. This paper introduces a variant of the IF model in order to simulate the adaptive neural firing pattern. An inductor branch is integrated into the IF model to track the variance of the external stimulus, and subsequently control the decrease of the instantaneous firing rate in response to the sustained stimulation. Simulation results demonstrated that the proposed model was able to reproduce the adaptive neural firing pattern. Besides, the inductor branch might adjust the decay rate of the adaptive firing curve and the prominent firing rate upon the onset of the adaptation. The proposed model is characterized by its structure simplicity and simulation efficiency, which would be helpful for the analysis and prediction of the adaptive firing responses of the sensory neurons.