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Receptive-field construction in cortical inhibitory interneurons

Nature Neuroscience volume 5, pages 403–404 (2002)Cite this article

An Erratum to this article was published on 01 July 2002

Abstract

In the somatosensory 'barrel' cortex1 (where each barrel represents an individual whisker) the receptive fields of cortical spiny neurons show considerable specificity for the direction of whisker displacement, as do the receptive fields of thalamocortical (TC) neurons that provide input to the barrels. In contrast, putative fast-spike inhibitory interneurons in layer 4 of the barrel cortex lack directional preference, but are exquisitely sensitive to low stimulus intensities2,3. Here we show, in adult rabbits, that these sensitive and broadly tuned inhibitory receptive fields are generated by an unselective pooling of convergent functional inputs from topographically aligned TC neurons with very diverse response properties.

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Figure 1: Convergent input from three TC neurons to a cortical SIN.
Figure 2: A powerful case of TC divergence: TC neuron 'Hercules' studied with nine different SINs (1–9) during four recording sessions.

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Notes

  1. NOTE: Note: An error was introduced in preparing this article for press. In the fifth sentence of the fourth paragraph, 135° was changed to 13°. An erratum will be published in the print version of the journal. The corrected version of this article is available in the PDF format.

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Acknowledgements

We thank K. Lukatela and J.-M. Alonso for comments and discussions. Supported by grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health (MH-64024), the National Science Foundation (IBN-0077694) and the Russian Foundation of Basic Research (00-04-49163).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, The University of Connecticut, 406 Babbidge Road, Storrs, 06269, Connecticut, USA

    Harvey A. Swadlow & Alexander G. Gusev

  2. Moscow Brain Research Institute, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, per. Obukha 5, 103064, Moscow, Russia

    Alexander G. Gusev

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  1. Harvey A. Swadlow
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  2. Alexander G. Gusev
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Correspondence to Harvey A. Swadlow.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Swadlow, H., Gusev, A. Receptive-field construction in cortical inhibitory interneurons. Nat Neurosci 5, 403–404 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn847

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