Fig. 10: Bursts in sensory-evoked cortical output of awake animals.
From: Thalamus enables active dendritic coupling of inputs arriving at different cortical layers
a Left: schematic of our experiments in vS1 of awake rats15. The schematic of the rat was adapted and modified from “Diamond ME, von Heimendahl M, Knutsen PM, Kleinfeld D, Ahissar E. ‘Where’ and ‘what’ in the whisker sensorimotor system. Nat Rev Neurosci 9, page 602, 2008, Springer Nature”68. Reproduced with permission from Springer Nature. Right: example recording for one PT. The trace shows APs recorded during three example trials in which the rat touched a pole with a single whisker during periods of voluntary rhythmic whisker movements (whisking). The gray boxes denote the 50 ms time window for which we analyzed sensory-evoked responses. b Example trials of the PT from panel a show that active touch evokes the same three types of sensory responses that we observed for passive whisker stimuli in Fig. 2. c Comparison of responses (≥ 1AP) and occurrences of bursts of 2 and 3 APs between passive whisker deflections (25 PTs) in anesthetized rats (N = 18) and active whisker touches (17 PTs) in awake rats (N = 15). Box plots represent medians and 25th to 75th percentiles. Whiskers extend to 1.5 times the interquartile range. The asterisk represents the Mann-Whitney U test, 1-sided: p = 0.017. d Top: 1 APs during periods of quiescence, whisking and active touch (n = 1763 trials, N = 16 PTs). Bottom: same as in the top panel, but for bursts of 3 APs. Box plots represent medians and 25th to 75th percentiles. Whiskers extend to 1.5 times the interquartile range. The asterisks represent 1-way ANOVA tests with PostHoc Tukey multiple comparison correction for quiescence vs. touch p = 0.023 and whisking vs. touch p = 0.041). Source data for panels (c, d) are provided in the Source Data file.
