Journal
JOURNAL OF PHYSIOLOGY-LONDON
Volume 597, Issue 10, Pages 2803-2817Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1113/JP277506
Keywords
Sparse coding; Vibrissal cortex; Whisker contact; Cell-attached recording; Whisker tracking; Sensory coding; Neuronal tuning; Layer 2; 3 sparseness
Categories
Funding
- National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC
- Australia) [1124411]
- Australian Research Council (ARC) [DP170100908]
- ARC Centre of Excellence for Integrative Brain Function grant [CE140100007]
- National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia [1124411] Funding Source: NHMRC
Ask authors/readers for more resources
It is widely reported that superficial layers of the somatosensory cortex exhibit sparse firing. This sparseness could reflect weak feedforward sensory inputs that are not sufficient to generate action potentials in these layers. Alternatively, sparseness might reflect tuning to unknown or higher-level complex features that are not fully explored in the stimulus space. Here, we examined these hypotheses by applying a range of vibrotactile and manual vibrissal stimuli in awake, head-fixed mice while performing loose-seal cell-attached recordings from the vibrissal primary somatosensory (vS1) cortex. A high-velocity stimulus delivered by a piezo-electric actuator evoked activity in a small fraction of regular spiking supragranular neurons (23%) in the awake condition. However, a majority of the supragranular regular spiking neurons (84%) were driven by manual stimulation of whiskers. Our results suggest that most neurons in the superficial layers of vS1 cortex contribute to coding in the awake condition when neurons may encounter their preferred feature(s) during whisker-object interactions.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available