'Where' and 'what' in the whisker sensorimotor system

Diamond, Mathew E.; Heimendahl, Moritz von; Knutsen, Per Magne; Kleinfeld, David; Ahissar, Ehud

doi:10.1038/nrn2411

Cited by 536 publications

(538 citation statements)

References 76 publications

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“…2B), the sensory system may record whisking motion equally well, no matter whether it is periodic or irregular 24). On the other hand, during object contact, whisker motion can be characterized as an irregular vibration containing frequencies up to a few hundred Hz (25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32). The "noisiness" of such kinetic profiles would evoke a particularly robust and temporally precise cortical response.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

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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Section: Discussionmentioning

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.

Self Cite

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“…There are several distinctions in experimental design. In our task, rather than applying stimuli to the fingertip, we selected the whisker sensory system due to its behavioral importance in rats (16,17,(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34). Another distinction is the structure of the vibration.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tactile perception and working memory in rats and humans

Fassihi

Akrami

Esmaeili

et al. 2014

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

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Primates can store sensory stimulus parameters in working memory for subsequent manipulation, but until now, there has been no demonstration of this capacity in rodents. Here we report tactile working memory in rats. Each stimulus is a vibration, generated as a series of velocity values sampled from a normal distribution. To perform the task, the rat positions its whiskers to receive two such stimuli, "base" and "comparison," separated by a variable delay. It then judges which stimulus had greater velocity SD. In analogous experiments, humans compare two vibratory stimuli on the fingertip. We demonstrate that the ability of rats to hold base stimulus information (for up to 8 s) and their acuity in assessing stimulus differences overlap the performance demonstrated by humans. This experiment highlights the ability of rats to perceive the statistical structure of vibrations and reveals their previously unknown capacity to store sensory information in working memory.

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“…S1 is necessary for tactile somatosensory perception in rodents [7][8][9][10][11][12][13] . The role of S1 in thermal perception, however, is under debate, 3 with three studies concluding that rodent S1 is not involved [14][15][16] and another concluding that it is 17 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A somatosensory circuit for cooling perception in mice

et al. 2014

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The temperature of an object provides important somatosensory information for animals performing tactile tasks. Humans can perceive skin cooling of less than one degree, but the sensory afferents and central circuits they engage to enable the perception of surface temperature are poorly understood. To address these questions, we examined the perception of glabrous skin cooling in mice. We found that mice were also capable of perceiving small amplitude skin cooling and that primary somatosensory (S1) cortical neurons were required for cooling perception. Moreover, the absence of the menthol-gated transient receptor potential melastatin 8 ion channel in sensory afferent fibers eliminated the ability to perceive cold and the corresponding activation of S1 neurons. Our results identify parts of a neural circuit underlying cold perception in mice and provide a new model system for the analysis of thermal processing and perception and multimodal integration.An accurate sense of surface temperature helps animals to perceive object structure and identity. Psychophysical experiments have shown that humans are able to perceive tiny changes in skin cooling with a range between 0.4 and 1.8 ˚C 1,2 . It has, however, proved challenging to assess the perceptual ability of rodents to discriminate small temperature steps at threshold levels.Classical paw withdrawal tests cannot differentiate between reflexive avoidance behavior and sensory perception 3 . Two-plate thermal preference arenas have shown that mice avoid cooler floor temperatures [4][5][6] , but this test has limited spatial and temporal control of the stimulus and lacks fine-grained resolution for near threshold perception. We therefore developed a shortlatency, goal-directed thermal perception task using the glabrous skin of the mouse forepaw.A general dogma is that all somatosensory input, including thermal, is integrated by the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) to form a coherent sensory percept. S1 is necessary for tactile somatosensory perception in rodents [7][8][9][10][11][12][13] . The role of S1 in thermal perception, however, is under debate, 3 with three studies concluding that rodent S1 is not involved [14][15][16] and another concluding that it is 17 . This may be because these studies used large cortical lesions with long recovery and retraining periods in freely moving rats that used facial regions to detect temperature [14][15][16][17] .Likewise, very little is known about the underlying cortical neural processing of non-noxious thermal stimuli in rodents. To the best of our knowledge, only one study, conducted in anesthetized rats stimulating scrotal skin, has shown extracellular responses of cortical neurons to thermal stimulation 18 . At the sensory periphery, a range of primary afferents including myelinated Aβ mechanoreceptors 2,19 , thinly myelinated Aδ-fibers and unmyelinated polymodal C fibers, fire during skin cooling 4,20,21 . Although it is thought that thickly myelinated Aδ fibers are responsible for cooling perception, C fibers ...

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'Where' and 'what' in the whisker sensorimotor system

Cited by 536 publications

References 76 publications

Correlated physiological and perceptual effects of noise in a tactile stimulus

Correlated physiological and perceptual effects of noise in a tactile stimulus

Tactile perception and working memory in rats and humans

A somatosensory circuit for cooling perception in mice

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