Independent representations of self-motion and object location in barrel cortex output.

During active tactile exploration, the dynamic patterns of touch are transduced to electrical signals and transformed by the brain into a mental representation of the object under investigation. This transformation from sensation to perception is thought to be a major function of the mammalian cortex. In primary somatosensory cortex (S1) of mice, layer 5 (L5) pyramidal neurons are major outputs to downstream areas that influence perception, decision-making, and motor control.

Behavioral and Neural Bases of Tactile Shape Discrimination Learning in Head-Fixed Mice.

Tactile shape recognition requires the perception of object surface angles. We investigate how neural representations of object angles are constructed from sensory input and how they reorganize across learning. Head-fixed mice learned to discriminate object angles by active exploration with one whisker.