Elementary motion sequence detectors in whisker somatosensory cortex.

ABSTRACT: How the somatosensory cortex (S1) encodes complex patterns of touch, such as those that occur during tactile exploration, is poorly understood. In the mouse whisker S1, temporally dense stimulation of local whisker pairs revealed that most neurons are not classical single-whisker feature detectors, but instead are strongly tuned to two-whisker sequences that involve the columnar whisker (CW) and one specific surround whisker (SW), usually in a SW-leading-CW order. Tuning was spatiotemporally precise and diverse across cells, generating a rate code for local motion vectors defined by SW-CW combinations. Spatially asymmetric, sublinear suppression for suboptimal combinations and near-linearity for preferred combinations sharpened combination tuning relative to linearly predicted tuning. This

SUBMITTER: Laboy-Juarez KJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6713603 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature