awake freely moving behavioral states information theory S1 cortex somatosensory processing
Objective. Sensory processing of peripheral information is not stationary but is, in general, a dynamic process related to the behavioral state of the animal. Yet the link between the state of the behavior and the encoding properties of neurons is unclear. This report investigates the impact of the behavioral state on the encoding mechanisms used by cortical neurons for both detection and discrimination of somatosensory stimuli in awake, freely moving, rats. Approach. Neuronal activity was recorded from the primary somatosensory cortex of five rats under two different behavioral states (quiet versus whisking) while electrical stimulation of increasing stimulus strength was delivered to the mystacial pad. Information theoretical measures were then used to measure the contribution of different encoding mechanisms to the information carried by neurons in response to the whisker stimulation. Main results. We found that the behavioral state of the animal modulated the total amount of information conveyed by neurons and that the timing of individual spikes increased the information compared to the total count of spikes alone. However, the temporal information, i.e. information exclusively related to when the spikes occur, was not modulated by behavioral state. Significance. We conclude that information about somatosensory stimuli is modulated by the behavior of the animal and this modulation is mainly expressed in the spike count while the temporal information is more robust to changes in behavioral state.
Spike count, spike timing and temporal information in the cortex of awake, freely moving rats
Creators
Alessandro Scaglione - School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, PA 19104, Philadelphia, USA. National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health, Baltimore, MD, USA.
Guglielmo Foffani - Drexel University
Karen A Moxon - Drexel University
Publication Details
Journal of neural engineering, v 11(4), 046022
Publisher
IOP Publishing
Number of pages
14
Resource Type
Journal article
Language
English
Academic Unit
School of Biomedical Engineering, Science, and Health Systems
Web of Science ID
WOS:000340046500022
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-84904604957
Other Identifier
991019169338704721
InCites Highlights
Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool: