W.M. Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience and Department of Physiology, University of California at San Francisco, 94143, USA.
Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2010 Jun;20(3):313-8. doi: 10.1016/j.conb.2010.02.014. Epub 2010 Mar 17.
The whisker somatosensory system in awake, behaving rodents is a powerful model for studying neurobiology of sensation, from molecules to circuits to behavior. Recent studies reveal how key tactile features are detected in awake animals and encoded by spike trains in somatosensory cortex (S1). Here we summarize progress on detection of surface texture (roughness). Texture appears to be inferred from the statistics of complex, irregular whisker micromotion on surfaces, specifically by mean speed or by patterns of discrete, high-velocity whisker slips. These are encoded in S1 by mean firing rate and by sparse, synchronous, slip-evoked spike volleys, respectively. An alternative model of place coding for texture based on differential whisker resonance is less well supported, but is not ruled out.
在清醒、行为活跃的啮齿动物中，胡须触感觉系统是研究感觉神经生物学的强大模型，涵盖从分子到回路再到行为的多个方面。最近的研究揭示了在清醒动物中，关键的触觉特征是如何被感觉皮层（S1）中的尖峰活动模式所检测和编码的。在这里，我们总结了关于表面纹理（粗糙度）检测的进展。纹理似乎是从表面上复杂、不规则的胡须微运动的统计数据中推断出来的，具体来说，是通过平均速度或离散、高速胡须滑动的模式来推断的。这些分别由 S1 中的平均发放率和稀疏、同步、滑动诱发的尖峰爆发来编码。另一种基于差分胡须共振的纹理位置编码模型虽然得到的支持较少，但也没有被排除。
