Barrel cortex function

TL;DR: This work reveals sparse and spatially intermingled representations of multiple tactile features in mice expressing GCaMP6s and nuclear red fluorescent proteins during performance of a single whisker object localization task and an encoding model related activity to behavioral variables.

TL;DR: Early spontaneous activity patterns control the formation of developing networks in sensory cortices, and disturbances of these activity patterns may lead to long-lasting neuronal deficits.

TL;DR: The potential for the use of known critical and sensitive periods during vertebrate development to investigate and advance the understanding of the neural bases underlying impairments in these developmental disorders of the nervous system is highlighted.

TL;DR: Making whole-cell recordings in primary somatosensory barrel cortex of behaving mice shows that S1 neurons projecting to primary motor cortex and those projecting to secondary somatoensory cortex have distinct intrinsic membrane properties and exhibit markedly different membrane potential dynamics during behavior.

TL;DR: A miniaturized head-mounted multiphoton microscope is described and its use for recording Ca2+ transients from the somata of layer 2/3 neurons in the visual cortex of awake, freely moving rats demonstrates that the multipoton fiberscope is suitable for functional imaging in awake and freely moving animals.

TL;DR: In upper-layer cortical neurons, D3cpv, an improved fluorescent resonance energy transfer–based FCIP, using a recombinant adeno-associated virus results in expression sufficient to detect the Ca2+ transients that accompany single action potentials, with high reliability from in vivo recordings in living mice.

TL;DR: The results suggest that the projection of “barreloids cells” to the granular and/or dysgranular zones relates to the class of prethalamic input(s) they receive.

TL;DR: The data suggest that barrel cortex firing rate on each trial leads directly to the animal's judgment of texture, and proposes firing rate as the fundamental coding mechanism.