Spatiotemporal receptive fields of barrel cortex revealed by reverse correlation of synaptic input.

ABSTRACT: Of all of the sensory areas, barrel cortex is among the best understood in terms of circuitry, yet least understood in terms of sensory function. We combined intracellular recording in rats with a multi-directional, multi-whisker stimulator system to estimate receptive fields by reverse correlation of stimuli to synaptic inputs. Spatiotemporal receptive fields were identified orders of magnitude faster than by conventional spike-based approaches, even for neurons with little spiking activity. Given a suitable stimulus representation, a linear model captured the stimulus-response relationship for all neurons with high accuracy. In contrast with conventional single-whisker stimuli, complex stimuli revealed markedly sharpened receptive fields, largely as a result of adaptation. This phenomeno

SUBMITTER: Ramirez A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4203687 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature