Unité de Neurosciences, Information et Complexité, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, FRE 3693, 91198 Gif-sur-Yvette, France.
Unité de Neurosciences, Information et Complexité, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, FRE 3693, 91198 Gif-sur-Yvette, France.
Cell Rep. 2018 Mar 27;22(13):3534-3547. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2018.03.006.
Rodents explore their environment with an array of whiskers, inducing complex patterns of whisker deflections. Cortical neuronal networks can extract global properties of tactile scenes. In the primary somatosensory cortex, the information relative to the global direction of a spatiotemporal sequence of whisker deflections can be extracted at the single neuron level. To further understand how the cortical network integrates multi-whisker inputs, we imaged and recorded the mouse barrel cortex activity evoked by sequences of multi-whisker deflections generating global motions in different directions. A majority of barrel-related cortical columns show a direction preference for global motions with an overall preference for caudo-ventral directions. Responses to global motions being highly sublinear, the identity of the first deflected whiskers is highly salient but does not seem to determine the global direction preference. Our results further demonstrate that the global direction preference is spatially organized throughout the barrel cortex at a supra-columnar scale.
啮齿动物用一系列胡须来探索它们的环境，引起复杂的胡须偏转模式。皮质神经元网络可以提取触觉场景的全局属性。在初级体感皮层中，相对时空序列的胡须偏转的全局方向的信息可以在单个神经元水平上提取。为了进一步了解皮质网络如何整合多胡须输入，我们对多胡须偏转序列诱发的老鼠桶状皮层活动进行了成像和记录，这些序列产生了不同方向的全局运动。大多数与桶状相关的皮层柱对具有整体朝向头侧-尾侧方向偏好的全局运动表现出方向偏好。对全局运动的反应呈高度次线性，第一个偏转的胡须的身份非常显著，但似乎并不能决定全局方向偏好。我们的结果进一步表明，全局方向偏好在桶状皮层的超柱范围内呈现空间组织。
