Julie Le Cam , Luc Estebanez , Vincent Jacob and Daniel E . Shulz barrel cortex is stimulus dependent

Spatial structure of multiwhisker receptive fields in the barrel cortex is stimulus dependent.

The tactile sensations mediated by the whisker-trigeminal system allow rodents to efficiently detect and discriminate objects. These capabilities rely strongly on the temporal and spatial structure of whisker deflections. Subthreshold but also spiking receptive fields in the barrel cortex encompass a large number of vibrissae, and it seems likely that the functional properties of these multiwhi...

Emergent Properties of Tactile Scenes Selectively Activate Barrel Cortex Neurons

Rats discriminate objects by scanning their surface with the facial vibrissae, producing spatiotemporally complex sequences of tactile contacts. The way in which the somatosensory cortex responds to these complex multivibrissal stimuli has not been explored. It is unclear yet whether contextual information from across the entire whisker pad influences cortical responses. Here, we delivered tact...

The Matrix: a new tool for probing the whisker-to-barrel system with natural stimuli.

The whisker to barrel system in rodents has become one of the major models for the study of sensory processing. Several tens of whiskers (or vibrissae) are distributed in a regular manner on both sides of the snout. Many tactile discrimination tasks using this system need multiple contacts with more than one whisker to be solved. With the aim of mimicking those multi-whisker stimuli during elec...

A radial map of multi-whisker correlation selectivity in the rat barrel cortex

In the barrel cortex, several features of single-whisker stimuli are organized in functional maps. The barrel cortex also encodes spatio-temporal correlation patterns of multi-whisker inputs, but so far the cortical mapping of neurons tuned to such input statistics is unknown. Here we report that layer 2/3 of the rat barrel cortex contains an additional functional map based on neuronal tuning t...

Information for Correlated input reveals coexisting coding schemes in a sensory cortex