Dataset Information

Spatiotemporal receptive fields of barrel cortex revealed by reverse correlation of synaptic input.

ABSTRACT: Of all of the sensory areas, barrel cortex is among the best understood in terms of circuitry, yet least understood in terms of sensory function. We combined intracellular recording in rats with a multi-directional, multi-whisker stimulator system to estimate receptive fields by reverse correlation of stimuli to synaptic inputs. Spatiotemporal receptive fields were identified orders of magnitude faster than by conventional spike-based approaches, even for neurons with little spiking activity. Given a suitable stimulus representation, a linear model captured the stimulus-response relationship for all neurons with high accuracy. In contrast with conventional single-whisker stimuli, complex stimuli revealed markedly sharpened receptive fields, largely as a result of adaptation. This phenomenon allowed the surround to facilitate rather than to suppress responses to the principal whisker. Optimized stimuli enhanced firing in layers 4-6, but not in layers 2/3, which remained sparsely active. Surround facilitation through adaptation may be required for discriminating complex shapes and textures during natural sensing.

SUBMITTER: Ramirez A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4203687 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Spatiotemporal receptive fields of barrel cortex revealed by reverse correlation of synaptic input.

Ramirez Alejandro A Pnevmatikakis Eftychios A EA Merel Josh J Paninski Liam L Miller Kenneth D KD Bruno Randy M RM

Nature neuroscience 20140518 6

Of all of the sensory areas, barrel cortex is among the best understood in terms of circuitry, yet least understood in terms of sensory function. We combined intracellular recording in rats with a multi-directional, multi-whisker stimulator system to estimate receptive fields by reverse correlation of stimuli to synaptic inputs. Spatiotemporal receptive fields were identified orders of magnitude faster than by conventional spike-based approaches, even for neurons with little spiking activity. Gi ...[more]

PMID: 24836076

Similar Datasets

Project description:A central question in sensory neuroscience is how neurons represent complex natural stimuli. This process involves multiple steps of feature extraction to obtain a condensed, categorical representation useful for classification and behaviour. It has previously been shown that central auditory neurons in the starling have composite receptive fields composed of multiple features. Whether this property is an idiosyncratic characteristic of songbirds, a group of highly specialized vocal learners or a generic property of sensory processing is unknown. To address this question, we have recorded responses from auditory cortical neurons in mice, and characterized their receptive fields using mouse ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) as a natural and ethologically relevant stimulus and pitch-shifted starling songs as a natural but ethologically irrelevant control stimulus. We have found that these neurons display composite receptive fields with multiple excitatory and inhibitory subunits. Moreover, this was the case with either the conspecific or the heterospecific vocalizations. We then trained the sparse filtering algorithm on both classes of natural stimuli to obtain statistically optimal features, and compared the natural and artificial features using UMAP, a dimensionality-reduction algorithm previously used to analyse mouse USVs and birdsongs. We have found that the receptive-field features obtained with both types of the natural stimuli clustered together, as did the sparse-filtering features. However, the natural and artificial receptive-field features clustered mostly separately. Based on these results, our general conclusion is that composite receptive fields are not a unique characteristic of specialized vocal learners but are likely a generic property of central auditory systems. KEY POINTS: Auditory cortical neurons in the mouse have composite receptive fields with several excitatory and inhibitory features. Receptive-field features capture temporal and spectral modulations of natural stimuli. Ethological relevance of the stimulus affects the estimation of receptive-field dimensionality.

Dataset Information

Spatiotemporal receptive fields of barrel cortex revealed by reverse correlation of synaptic input.

Publications

Spatiotemporal receptive fields of barrel cortex revealed by reverse correlation of synaptic input.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets