Sensorimotor processing in the rodent barrel cortex

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Tactile sensory information from facial whiskers provides nocturnal tunnel-dwelling rodents such as mice and rats with important spatial and textural information about their immediate surroundings. Whiskers are moved back and forth to scan the environment, and touch signals from each whisker evoke sparse patterns of neuronal activity in primary somatosensory barrel cortex (wS1). Whisking is accompanied by desynchronised brain states with cell-type-specific changes in spontaneous and evoked neuronal activity. Many tactile features, including texture and object location, appear to be computed in wS1 through integration of motor and sensory signals. wS1 also directly controls whisker movements and contributes to learned, whisker-dependent goal-directed behaviors. The cell-type-specific neuronal circuitry in wS1 that contributes to whisker sensory perception is beginning to be defined.

Related collections

Most cited references 160

Record: found
Abstract: not found
Article: not found

Über das Elektrenkephalogramm des Menschen

Hans Berger (1929)

0 comments Cited 580 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

The neocortical circuit: themes and variations.

Kenneth D M Harris, Gordon M G Shepherd (2015)

Similarities in neocortical circuit organization across areas and species suggest a common strategy to process diverse types of information, including sensation from diverse modalities, motor control and higher cognitive processes. Cortical neurons belong to a small number of main classes. The properties of these classes, including their local and long-range connectivity, developmental history, gene expression, intrinsic physiology and in vivo activity patterns, are remarkably similar across areas. Each class contains subclasses; for a rapidly growing number of these, conserved patterns of input and output connections are also becoming evident. The ensemble of circuit connections constitutes a basic circuit pattern that appears to be repeated across neocortical areas, with area- and species-specific modifications. Such 'serially homologous' organization may adapt individual neocortical regions to the type of information each must process.

0 comments Cited 416 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Synaptic tagging and long-term potentiation.

U Frey, R G Morris (1997)

Repeated stimulation of hippocampal neurons can induce an immediate and prolonged increase in synaptic strength that is called long-term potentiation (LTP)-the primary cellular model of memory in the mammalian brain. An early phase of LTP (lasting less than three hours) can be dissociated from late-phase LTP by using inhibitors of transcription and translation, Because protein synthesis occurs mainly in the cell body, whereas LTP is input-specific, the question arises of how the synapse specificity of late LTP is achieved without elaborate intracellular protein trafficking. We propose that LTP initiates the creation of a short-lasting protein-synthesis-independent 'synaptic tag' at the potentiated synapse which sequesters the relevant protein(s) to establish late LTP. In support of this idea, we now show that weak tetanic stimulation, which ordinarily leads only to early LTP, or repeated tetanization in the presence of protein-synthesis inhibitors, each results in protein-synthesis-dependent late LTP, provided repeated tetanization has already been applied at another input to the same population of neurons. The synaptic tag decays in less than three hours. These findings indicate that the persistence of LTP depends not only on local events during its induction, but also on the prior activity of the neuron.