Serotonin increases population coding of behaviorally relevant stimuli by enhancing responses of ON but not OFF-type sensory neurons.

ABSTRACT: How neural populations encode sensory input to generate behavioral responses remains a central problem in systems neuroscience. Here we investigated how neuromodulation influences population coding of behaviorally relevant stimuli to give rise to behavior in the electrosensory system of the weakly electric fish Apteronotus leptorhynchus. We performed multi-unit recordings from ON and OFF sensory pyramidal cells in response to stimuli whose amplitude (i.e., envelope) varied in time, before and after electrical stimulation of the raphe nuclei. Overall, raphe stimulation increased population coding by ON- but not by OFF-type cells, despite both cell types showing similar sensitivities to the stimulus at the single neuron level. Surprisingly, only changes in population coding by ON-type

SUBMITTER: Marquez MM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10395545 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature