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The Journal of Neuroscience, September 6, 2006, 26(36):9216-9226; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1491-06.2006

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Deciphering the Spike Train of a Sensory Neuron: Counts and Temporal Patterns in the Rat Whisker Pathway

Ehsan Arabzadeh,¹ Stefano Panzeri,² and Mathew E. Diamond¹

¹Cognitive Neuroscience Sector, International School for Advanced Studies, 34014 Trieste, Italy, and ²Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M60 1QD, United Kingdom

Correspondence should be addressed to Mathew E. Diamond, Cognitive Neuroscience Sector, International School for Advanced Studies, Via Beirut 2/4, 34014 Trieste, Italy. Email: diamond{at}sissa.it

Rats achieve remarkable texture discriminations by sweeping their facial whiskers along surfaces. This work explores how neurons at two levels of the sensory pathway, trigeminal ganglion and barrel cortex, carry information about such stimuli. We identified two biologically plausible coding mechanisms, spike counts and patterns, and used "mutual information" to quantify how reliably neurons in anesthetized rats reported texture when "decoded" according to these candidate mechanisms. For discriminations between surfaces of different coarseness, spike counts could be decoded reliably and rapidly (within 30 ms after stimulus onset in cortex). Information increased as responses were considered as spike patterns with progressively finer temporal precision. At highest temporal resolution (spike sequences across six bins of 4 ms), the quantity of "information" in patterns rose 150% for ganglion neurons and 110% for cortical neurons above that in spike counts. In some cases, patterns permitted discriminations not supported by spike counts alone.

Key words: sensory coding; information theory; spike timing; trigeminal ganglion; barrel cortex; vibrissae

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Received April 7, 2006; revised July 6, 2006; accepted July 18, 2006.

Correspondence should be addressed to Mathew E. Diamond, Cognitive Neuroscience Sector, International School for Advanced Studies, Via Beirut 2/4, 34014 Trieste, Italy. Email: diamond{at}sissa.it

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