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: GABA-releasing cortical interneurons are likely to provide delayed dendritic inhibition during exploratory behavior, contributing to the maintenance of a balance between cortical excitation and inhibition while leaving a wide temporal window open for synaptic integration and plasticity in distal dendrites.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that the surround receptive fields of barrel cells are generated by intracortical transmission and that many septal cells derive a component of their surround receptive field from the thalamus.

TL;DR: It is reported that adjacent whisker-evoked excitation and inhibition within a barrel are unaffected by ablation of the corresponding adjacent barrel, and in supragranular neurons, excitatory responses to the ablated barrel's associated whisker are substantially reduced.

TL;DR: The results suggest that the recurrent excitatory circuits of cortex may amplify the initial feedforward thalamic signal, subserving dynamic modifications of the functional properties of cortical neurons10–12.