Fig. 6: Neural encoding of whisker- and head kinematics during active sensory exploration.
From: A tactile discrimination task to study neuronal dynamics in freely-moving mice
a Representative examples of whisker angle tuning in the VPM, showing firing rates of a tuned unit (top) and non-tuned unit (bottom) as a function of whisker angle with null distributions (gray, mean ± SEM). b Proportion of units significantly tuned to whisker angle in the BC, VPM, POm, and ZIv (see Methods). Each dot represents the mean proportion for an individual animal, with the cohort mean ± standard deviation as colored bars. c Examples of whisker phase tuning in the BC, with firing rates plotted for a tuned unit (left) and a non-tuned unit (right) across whisker phases. A sinusoidal function is fitted to the respective distribution. d Proportion of units significantly and standard deviation (bars) tuned to whisker phase in the BC, VPM, POm, and ZIv. Representations follow the logic of Fig. 6b. e Polar plots of phase-tuned units across brain regions, displaying individual vectors (gray arrows) and the mean population vector (colored arrows) of whisker phase tuning. f Proportion of units and standard deviation (bars) tuned to head azimuth with egocentric (left) and allocentric (right) references across BC, VPM, POm, and ZIv. Representations follow the logic of Fig. 6b. a Test against null-distribution of shuffled spike times (see Methods), c Kuiper test; n = 413 (BC), 420 (VPM), 261 (POm), and 147 (ZIv) units in total. Data pooled from n = 6 mice.
