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1 Neurobiology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: sitst1{at}pitt.edu.
In layer IV of rat somatosensory cortex, barrel circuitry is highly sensitive to thalamic population firing rates during the first few ms of the whisker-evoked response. This sensitivity of barrel neurons to thalamic firing synchrony was inferred previously from analysis of simulated barrel circuitry and from single-unit recordings performed one-at-a-time. In this study we investigate stimulus-dependent synchronous activity in the thalamic ventral posteromedial nucleus (VPm) using a more direct approach of local field potential (LFP) recordings. We report that thalamic barreloid neurons generate larger magnitude LFP responses to principal vs. adjacent whiskers, to preferred vs. non-preferred movement directions, and to high vs. low velocity/acceleration deflections. Responses were better predicted by acceleration than velocity, and they were insensitive to the final amplitude of whisker deflection. Importantly, reliable and robust stimulus/response relationships were found only for the initial 1.2-7.5 ms of the thalamic LFP response, reflecting arrival of afferent information from the brainstem. Later components of the thalamic response, which are likely to coincide with arrival of inhibitory inputs from the thalamic reticular nucleus and excitatory inputs from the barrel cortex itself, are variable and poorly predicted by stimulus parameters. Together with previous results, these findings underscore a critical role for thalamic firing synchrony in the encoding of small but rapidly changing perturbations of specific whiskers in particular directions.
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