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Journal of Neuroscience, Vol 14, 3511-3532, Copyright © 1994 by Society for Neuroscience
Spatiotemporal structure of somatosensory responses of many-neuron ensembles in the rat ventral posterior medial nucleus of the thalamus
MA Nicolelis and JK Chapin
Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Hahnemann University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19102-1192.
Classically, the rat ventral posterior medial (VPM) nucleus of the thalamus
has been considered as a simple passive relay for single- whisker
information to the primary somatosensory cortex (SI). However, recent
reports have suggested that the VPM could contain a much more coarsely
coded and spatiotemporally complex representation of the rat whisker pad.
To address this possibility properly, we have carried out chronic
simultaneous recordings of large numbers (up to 23) of single neurons,
distributed across the entire VPM, in both awake and lightly anesthetized
adult rats. Quantitative, computer-based reconstruction of receptive fields
(RFs) revealed that single VPM neurons exhibit significant responses to
discrete stimulation of as many as 20 single whiskers (mean +/- SD RF size,
13.7 +/- 4.8 whiskers). By defining multiple response magnitude (RM)
thresholds it was possible to subdivide these large VPM RFs quantitatively
into a prominent center (mean +/- SD, 1.41 +/- 0.70 whiskers, RM > 95%)
and an excitatory surround (up to 18 whiskers, RM < 95%). VPM neurons
exhibited both short-latency responses (SLRs, from 4 to 10 msec
poststimulus) and/or long-latency responses (LLRs, 15-25 msec), each
followed by inhibitory responses. Though LLRs were weaker (mean +/- SD,
47.19 +/- 33.34 Hz) than SLRs (119.63 +/- 50.12 Hz), they often defined RFs
that differed considerably from those defined by the SLRs of the same cell.
In particular, VPM cells with short-latency RFs centered in caudal whiskers
(e.g., C1, D1, E1) showed a poststimulus time-dependent shift of these RF
centers toward the rostral whiskers (e.g., C4, D4, E4). These
caudal-to-rostral (C-->RF shifts occurred in neurons with the largest
RFs of our sample (17.2 +/- 2.4 whiskers). On the other hand, VPM cells
with short-latency RFs centered in rostral whiskers had the smallest RFs
(13.1 +/- 4.1 whiskers) and usually did not exhibit time- dependent RF
center shifts. Multivariate analysis revealed that these two groups of VPM
neurons, C-->R shifting and rostral position (RP) cells, could be
statistically distinguished according to a combination of three RF
attributes (short-latency RF center location, RF size, and magnitude of RF
center shift). Quantitative, computer-based reconstruction of "population
response maps" demonstrated that the "place" coding for each single whisker
in the VPM involved a distinct weighted contribution from a large
proportion of the simultaneously recorded neurons.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT
400 WORDS)
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