Neural coding in barrel cortex during whisker-guided locomotion
- Janelia Research Center, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, United States
- Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, United States
- University of Southern California, United States
- Cited 36
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Abstract
Animals seek out relevant information by moving through a dynamic world, but sensory systems are usually studied under highly constrained and passive conditions that may not probe important dimensions of the neural code. Here we explored neural coding in the barrel cortex of head-fixed mice that tracked walls with their whiskers in tactile virtual reality. Optogenetic manipulations revealed that barrel cortex plays a role in wall-tracking. Closed-loop optogenetic control of layer 4 neurons can substitute for whisker-object contact to guide behavior resembling wall tracking. We measured neural activity using two-photon calcium imaging and extracellular recordings. Neurons were tuned to the distance between the animal snout and the contralateral wall, with monotonic, unimodal, and multimodal tuning curves. This rich representation of object location in the barrel cortex could not be predicted based on simple stimulus-response relationships involving individual whiskers and likely emerges within cortical circuits.
Article and author information
Author details
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All procedures were in accordance with protocols approved by the Janelia Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. (IACUC 14-115)
Reviewing Editor
- Sacha B Nelson, Brandeis University, United States
Publication history
- Received: October 24, 2015
- Accepted: December 21, 2015
- Accepted Manuscript published: December 23, 2015 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: February 11, 2016 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2015, Sofroniew et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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