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Role of spike timing in the forelimb somatosensory cortex of the rat
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Role of spike timing in the forelimb somatosensory cortex of the rat

Guglielmo Foffani, Banu Tutunculer and Karen A Moxon
The Journal of neuroscience, v 24(33), pp 7266-7271
18 Aug 2004
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2523-04.2004
PMID: 15317852
url
https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.2523-04.2004View
Published, Version of Record (VoR)CC BY-NC-SA V4.0,  Open
url
https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2523-04.2004View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that the significance of spike timing in somatosensory processing is not a specific feature of the whisker cortex but a more general characteristic of the primary somatosensory cortex. We recorded ensembles of neurons using microwire arrays implanted in the deep layers of the forelimb region of the rat primary somatosensory cortex in response to step stimuli delivered to the cutaneous surface of the contralateral body. We used a recently developed peristimulus time histogram (PSTH)-based classification method to investigate the temporal precision of the code by evaluating how changing the bin size (from 40 to 1 msec) would affect the ability of the ensemble responses to discriminate stimulus location on a single-trial basis. The information related to the discrimination was redundantly distributed within the ensembles, and the ability to discriminate stimulus location increased when decreasing the bin size, reaching a maximum at 4 msec. In our experiment, at 4 msec bin size the first spike per neuron after the stimulus conveyed almost as much information as the entire responses, so the temporal precision of the code was preserved in the first spikes. Subsequent spikes were less frequent but conveyed more information per spike. Finally, not only the trials correctly classified but also the trials incorrectly classified conveyed information about stimulus location with a similar temporal precision. We conclude that the role of spike timing in cortical somatosensory processing is not an exclusive feature of the highly specialized rat trigeminal system, but a more general property of the rat primary somatosensory cortex.

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