Examination of the spatial and temporal distribution of sensory cortical activity using a 100-electrode array

Rousche, P.J.; Petersen, Rasmus S.; Battiston, Stefano; Giannotta, Sabina; Diamond, Mathew E.

doi:10.1016/s0165-0270(99)00061-8

Cited by 42 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…The subjects were five adult male Wistar rats (320 -390 gm). Physiological procedures were identical to those reported in previous publications (Rousche et al, 1999;Petersen and Diamond, 2000;Erchova et al, 2002). Surgical anesthesia was induced by urethane (1.5 gm/kg body weight, i.p.)…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Rapid Fluctuations in Rat Barrel Cortex Plasticity

Erchova

Diamond²

2004

J. Neurosci.

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Neuronal populations in the sensory cortex exhibit fluctuations in excitability, and the present experiments tested the hypothesis that these variations coincide with peaks and troughs in cortical modifiability. The activity of multiunit neuronal clusters under light urethane anesthesia was recorded through 100-microelectrode arrays implanted in the infragranular layers of rat barrel cortex. Spontaneous activity was characterized by "bursts" of spikes, synchronized across the barrel cortex. This allowed activity at one selected electrode to be taken as a reliable monitor of widespread cortical bursts. We used spikes at the selected electrode to trigger stimulation of two pairs of whiskers during a 50 min conditioning procedure: (1) for the "burst-conditioned" whisker pair, each stimulus was delivered 1 msec after the triggering spike, activating cortex coincident with the burst; and (2) for the "interburst-conditioned" whisker pair, each stimulus was delivered 300 msec after the triggering spike, activating cortex during the trough between bursts. The cross-correlation between cortical neurons in the pairs of columns matching the stimulated whisker pairs was estimated after the termination of the conditioning procedure. Conditioning produced a twofold increase in the degree of co-firing between infragranular neurons in columns receiving burstconditioned costimulation but no significant change in connectivity between infragranular neurons in columns receiving interburstconditioned costimulation, although the two pairs of columns received an equal number of sensory inputs. These findings suggest that the strength of co-activity between columns in the barrel cortex can be modified by sensory input patterns during discrete, intermittent intervals time-locked to bursts.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Rapid Fluctuations in Rat Barrel Cortex Plasticity

Erchova

Diamond²

2004

J. Neurosci.

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“…A 10 × 10 grid of electrodes 1.5 mm long with 400 μm tip-to-tip spacing (Cyberkinetics Inc) was inserted into the whisker region of the left somatosensory cortex (Fig. 1B), identified by vascular landmarks and stereotaxic coordinates (43). The depths of electrode penetrations were 700-1000 μm in all experiments, ensuring that recordings were made from the middle layers, presumably layer 4.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Correlated physiological and perceptual effects of noise in a tactile stimulus

Lak

Arabzadeh²,

Harris³

et al. 2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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We investigated connections between the physiology of rat barrel cortex neurons and the sensation of vibration in humans. One set of experiments measured neuronal responses in anesthetized rats to trains of whisker deflections, each train characterized either by constant amplitude across all deflections or by variable amplitude ("amplitude noise"). Firing rate and firing synchrony were, on average, boosted by the presence of noise. However, neurons were not uniform in their responses to noise. Barrel cortex neurons have been categorized as regular-spiking units (putative excitatory neurons) and fast-spiking units (putative inhibitory neurons). Among regular-spiking units, amplitude noise caused a higher firing rate and increased cross-neuron synchrony. Among fast-spiking units, noise had the opposite effect: It led to a lower firing rate and decreased cross-neuron synchrony. This finding suggests that amplitude noise affects the interaction between inhibitory and excitatory neurons. From these physiological effects, we expected that noise would lead to an increase in the perceived intensity of a vibration. We tested this notion using psychophysical measurements in humans. As predicted, subjects overestimated the intensity of noisy vibrations. Thus the physiological mechanisms present in barrel cortex also appear to be at work in the human tactile system, where they affect vibration perception.psychophysics | somatosensory cortex | vibration | whisker | finger A n effective approach to uncover how neuronal activity leads to sensation is to vary stimulation parameters while correlating changes in firing with changes in the percept (1-5). In the present work, we measured changes in neuronal activity in rat somatosensory ("barrel") cortex induced by variation in vibration parameters and correlated these changes with perceptual reports from human subjects. The stimuli in the two cases were trains of whisker and skin vibration, respectively.Isolated neurons respond more robustly to unpredictable (noisy) patterns of electrical stimulation than to repeating, periodic patterns (6) or constant inputs (7). Synaptic transmission also can be enhanced by noise (8). In a recent study of the effects of stimulus noise in rat barrel cortex, we found that whisker vibration trains containing temporal noise (irregularity in the sequence of interdeflection intervals) evoked a larger and more synchronous cortical response than did periodic vibration trains (9). In the present work, to verify that response amplification by noise is a general property of the sensory system, we explored another stimulus feature: We compared cortical responses to trains that had constant amplitude vs. trains that had varying amplitude. We then investigated the perceptual impact of noise using psychophysical experiments in humans. We predicted that noise, by enhancing neuronal firing rates and/or firing synchrony in somatosensory cortex, would produce a systematic bias in the perceived intensity of noisy vibrations compared with noise-free vibrations. Resu...

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“…Ganglion neurons were recorded by advancing a single electrode (Frederick Haer Company, Bowdoinham, ME) to a position determined by stereotaxic coordinates. Cortical recordings were obtained by inserting a 100 microelectrode array (Cyberkinetcs, Foxborough, MA) to a depth of 700 -1000 m in left barrel cortex (Rousche et al, 1999). Ganglion recordings were always single units, whereas cortical recordings consisted of a multiunit cluster at each channel.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deciphering the Spike Train of a Sensory Neuron: Counts and Temporal Patterns in the Rat Whisker Pathway

Arabzadeh¹,

Panzeri²,

Diamond³

2006

J. Neurosci.

155

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Rats achieve remarkable texture discriminations by sweeping their facial whiskers along surfaces. This work explores how neurons at two levels of the sensory pathway, trigeminal ganglion and barrel cortex, carry information about such stimuli. We identified two biologically plausible coding mechanisms, spike counts and patterns, and used "mutual information" to quantify how reliably neurons in anesthetized rats reported texture when "decoded" according to these candidate mechanisms. For discriminations between surfaces of different coarseness, spike counts could be decoded reliably and rapidly (within 30 ms after stimulus onset in cortex). Information increased as responses were considered as spike patterns with progressively finer temporal precision. At highest temporal resolution (spike sequences across six bins of 4 ms), the quantity of "information" in patterns rose 150% for ganglion neurons and 110% for cortical neurons above that in spike counts. In some cases, patterns permitted discriminations not supported by spike counts alone.

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Examination of the spatial and temporal distribution of sensory cortical activity using a 100-electrode array

Cited by 42 publications

References 24 publications

Rapid Fluctuations in Rat Barrel Cortex Plasticity

Rapid Fluctuations in Rat Barrel Cortex Plasticity

Correlated physiological and perceptual effects of noise in a tactile stimulus

Deciphering the Spike Train of a Sensory Neuron: Counts and Temporal Patterns in the Rat Whisker Pathway

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