Galvez Roberto, Weiss Craig, Weible Aldis P, Disterhoft John F
Department of Physiology, Institute for Neuroscience, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois 60611, USA.
J Neurosci. 2006 May 31;26(22):6062-8. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5582-05.2006.
Whisker deflection conditioned stimuli (CS) were demonstrated to activate physiologically and anatomically defined barrels in the contralateral somatosensory cortex and to support trace-eyeblink conditioned responses when paired with corneal airpuff unconditioned stimuli in rabbits. Analysis of cytochrome-oxidase-stained somatosensory whisker-associated cortical barrels revealed a row-specific expansion of the conditioned compared with the nontrained hemisphere. This expansion was not evident in pseudo-conditioned rabbits, suggesting that this expansion of conditioned cortical barrels in response to a hippocampal- and forebrain-dependent learning task (trace conditioning) is associative rather than activity dependent. Using whisker stimulation as a CS in the well studied eyeblink conditioning paradigm will facilitate characterizing sensory cortical involvement in controlling and modulating an associatively learned response at the neural systems and cellular level.
在兔子中，触须偏转条件刺激（CS）被证明能激活对侧体感皮层中生理和解剖学上定义的桶状结构，并且当与角膜吹气非条件刺激配对时，能支持痕迹性眨眼条件反应。对细胞色素氧化酶染色的体感触须相关皮层桶状结构的分析显示，与未训练的半球相比，条件刺激组有行特异性的扩展。这种扩展在假条件刺激的兔子中不明显，这表明这种响应海马体和前脑依赖学习任务（痕迹条件反射）的条件性皮层桶状结构扩展是关联性的，而非活动依赖性的。在充分研究的眨眼条件反射范式中使用触须刺激作为条件刺激，将有助于在神经系统和细胞水平上表征感觉皮层在控制和调节关联性学习反应中的作用。
