Diamond Mathew E, Toso Alessandro
Cognitive Neuroscience, International School for Advanced Studies, Via Bonomea 265, 34136 Trieste, Italy.
Cognitive Neuroscience, International School for Advanced Studies, Via Bonomea 265, 34136 Trieste, Italy.
Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2023 Jun;149:105161. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105161. Epub 2023 Apr 5.
Since the discovery 50 years ago of the precisely ordered representation of the whiskers in somatosensory cortex, the rodent tactile sensory system has been a fertile ground for the study of sensory processing. With the growing sophistication of touch-based behavioral paradigms, together with advances in neurophysiological methodology, a new approach is emerging. By posing increasingly complex perceptual and memory problems, in many cases analogous to human psychophysical tasks, investigators now explore the operations underlying rodent problem solving. We define the neural basis of tactile cognition as the transformation from a stage in which neuronal activity encodes elemental features, local in space and in time, to a stage in which neuronal activity is an explicit representation of the behavioral operations underlying the current task. Selecting a set of whisker-based behavioral tasks, we show that rodents achieve high level performance through the workings of neuronal circuits that are accessible, decodable, and manipulatable. As a means towards exploring tactile cognition, this review presents leading psychophysical paradigms and, where known, their neural correlates.
自50年前在体感皮层发现胡须的精确有序表征以来，啮齿动物的触觉感觉系统一直是研究感觉处理的肥沃土壤。随着基于触觉的行为范式日益复杂，以及神经生理学方法的进步，一种新方法正在兴起。通过提出越来越复杂的感知和记忆问题，在许多情况下类似于人类心理物理学任务，研究人员现在探索啮齿动物解决问题背后的操作。我们将触觉认知的神经基础定义为从神经元活动编码空间和时间上局部的基本特征的阶段，到神经元活动明确表示当前任务背后行为操作的阶段的转变。通过选择一组基于胡须的行为任务，我们表明啮齿动物通过可访问、可解码和可操纵的神经元回路的运作实现了高水平的表现。作为探索触觉认知的一种手段，本综述介绍了主要的心理物理学范式以及已知的它们的神经关联。
