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: Results indicate that spiny stellate cells act predominantly as local signal processors within a single barrel, whereas pyramidal cells globally integrate horizontal and top-down information within a functional column and between neighboring barrels.

TL;DR: Results show that the strength of unitary excitatory connections of spiny neurons is similar among different targets, and that the ready activation of FS cells by TC inputs, coupled with powerful feedforward inhibition from these neurons, would profoundly influence sensory processing and constrain runaway excitation in vivo.

TL;DR: It is concluded that vibration kinetics are rapidly and reliably encoded in the firing rate of cortical ensembles, therefore, the cortical representation of vibration speed could underlie texture discrimination.

TL;DR: Adult owl monkeys were trained to detect differences in the frequency of a tactile flutter-vibration stimulus above a 20-Hz standard and the cortical representations of the trained hands were substantially more complex in topographic detail than the representations of unstimulated hands or of passively stimulated control hands.