text: The term "autapse" was first coined in 1972 by Van der Loos and Glaser, who observed them in Golgi preparations of the rabbit occipital cortex while originally conducting a quantitative analysis of neocortex circuitry. Also in the 1970s, autapses have been described in dog and rat cerebral cortex, monkey neostriatum, and cat spinal cord.
  In 2000, they were first modeled as supporting persistence in recurrent neural networks. In 2004, they were modeled as demonstrating oscillatory behavior, which was absent in the same model neuron without autapse. More specifically, the neuron oscillated between high firing rates and firing suppression, reflecting the spike bursting behavior typically found in cerebral neurons. In 2009, autapses were, for the first time, associated with sustained activation. This proposed a possible function for excitatory autapses within a neural circuit. In 2014, electrical autapses were shown to generate stable target and spiral waves in a neural model network. This indicated that they played a significant role in stimulating and regulating the collective behavior of neurons in the network. In 2016, a model of resonance was offered.
  Autapses have been used to simulate "same cell" conditions to help researchers make quantitative comparisons, such as studying how N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) antagonists affect synaptic versus extrasynaptic NMDARs.