Publications by authors named "Christian Waiblinger"

Parkinson's disease (PD) is characterized by the degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in the striatum, predominantly associated with motor symptoms. However, non-motor deficits, particularly sensory symptoms, often precede motor manifestations, offering a potential early diagnostic window. The impact of non-motor deficits on sensation behavior and the underlying mechanisms remains poorly understood.

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Behavioral experience and flexibility are crucial for survival in a constantly changing environment. Despite evolutionary pressures to develop adaptive behavioral strategies in a dynamically changing sensory landscape, the underlying neural correlates have not been well explored. Here, we use genetically encoded voltage imaging to measure signals in primary somatosensory cortex (S1) during sensory learning and behavioral adaptation in the mouse.

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Models of basal ganglia (BG) function predict that tonic inhibitory output to motor thalamus (MT) suppresses unwanted movements, and that a decrease in such activity leads to action selection. Further, for unilateral activity changes in the BG, a lateralized effect on contralateral movements can be expected due to ipsilateral thalamocortical connectivity. However, a direct test of these outcomes of thalamic inhibition has not been performed.

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Behavioral adaptation is a prerequisite for survival in a constantly changing sensory environment, but the underlying strategies and relevant variables driving adaptive behavior are not well understood. Many learning models and neural theories consider probabilistic computations as an efficient way to solve a variety of tasks, especially if uncertainty is involved. Although this suggests a possible role for probabilistic inference and expectation in adaptive behaviors, there is little if any evidence of this relationship experimentally.

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Little is known about whether information transfer at primary sensory thalamic nuclei is modified by behavioral context. Here we studied the influence of previous decisions/rewards on current choices and preceding spike responses of ventroposterior medial thalamus (VPm; the primary sensory thalamus in the rat whisker-related tactile system). We trained head-fixed rats to detect a ramp-like deflection of one whisker interspersed within ongoing white noise stimulation.

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With the recent breakthrough in genetically expressed voltage indicators (GEVIs), there has been a tremendous demand to determine the capabilities of these sensors . Novel voltage sensitive fluorescent proteins allow for direct measurement of neuron membrane potential changes through changes in fluorescence. Here, we utilized ArcLight, a recently developed GEVI, and examined the functional characteristics in the widely used mouse somatosensory whisker pathway.

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It has been posited that the regulation of burst/tonic firing in the thalamus could function as a mechanism for controlling not only how much but what kind of information is conveyed to downstream cortical targets. Yet how this gating mechanism is adaptively modulated on fast timescales by ongoing sensory inputs in rich sensory environments remains unknown. Using single-unit recordings in the rat vibrissa thalamus (VPm), we found that the degree of bottom-up adaptation modulated thalamic burst/tonic firing as well as the synchronization of bursting across the thalamic population along a continuum for which the extremes facilitate detection or discrimination of sensory inputs.

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Rodents use active whisker movements to explore their environment. The "slip hypothesis" of whisker-related tactile perception entails that short-lived kinematic events (abrupt whisker movements, called "slips", due to bioelastic whisker properties that occur during active touch of textures) carry the decisive texture information. Supporting this hypothesis, previous studies have shown that slip amplitude and frequency occur in a texture-dependent way.

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Which physical parameter of vibrissa deflections is extracted by the rodent tactile system for discrimination? Particularly, it remains unclear whether perception has access to instantaneous kinematic parameters (i.e., the details of the trajectory) or relies on temporally integration of the movement trajectory such as frequency (e.

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This paper describes experimental techniques with head-fixed, operantly conditioned rodents that allow the control of stimulus presentation and tracking of motor output at hitherto unprecedented levels of spatio-temporal precision. Experimental procedures for the surgery and behavioral training are presented. We place particular emphasis on potential pitfalls using these procedures in order to assist investigators who intend to engage in this type of experiment.

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Article Synopsis
  • Understanding how the brain processes sensory information involves connecting physical stimuli to both how decisions are made and neuronal activity.
  • In an experiment with head-fixed rats, it was found that they could distinguish between two vibration frequencies (90 Hz and 60 Hz) only when the vibration intensity changed with frequency.
  • By manipulating the amplitude of the vibrations, researchers discovered that when the intensity was equal, the rats could not tell the difference between the frequencies, indicating that the brain relies on the mean absolute velocity of the vibrations for perception.
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Background: Carotid artery stenting (CAS) is associated with the risk of intraprocedural stroke. A better understanding of specific risk factors could help to improve the procedure and to reduce the overall risk of CAS. We addressed the role of carotid plaque echolucency as potential risk factor for cerebral embolism during CAS.

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