title: Responses of trigeminal ganglion neurons to the radial distance of contact during active vibrissal touch.
abstract: Rats explore their environment by actively moving their whiskers. Recently, we described how object location in the horizontal (front-back) axis is encoded by first-order neurons in the trigeminal ganglion (TG) by spike timing. Here we show how TG neurons encode object location along the radial coordinate, i.e., from the snout outward. Using extracellular recordings from urethane-anesthetized rats and electrically induced whisking, we found that TG neurons encode radial distance primarily by the number of spikes fired. When an object was positioned closer to the whisker root, all touch-selective neurons recorded fired more spikes. Some of these cells responded exclusively to objects located near the base of whiskers, signaling proximal touch by an identity (labeled-line) code. A number of tonic touch-selective neurons also decreased delays from touch to the first spike and decreased interspike intervals for closer object positions. Information theory analysis revealed that near-certainty discrimination between two objects separated by 30% of the length of whiskers was possible for some single cells. However, encoding reliability was usually lower as a result of large trial-by-trial response variability. Our current findings, together with the identity coding suggested by anatomy for the vertical dimension and the temporal coding of the horizontal dimension, suggest that object location is encoded by separate neuronal variables along the three spatial dimensions: temporal for the horizontal, spatial for the vertical, and spike rate for the radial dimension.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurobiology, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.
authors.forename: Marcin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Szwed
authors.forename: Knarik
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Bagdasarian
authors.forename: Barak
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Blumenfeld
authors.forename: Omri
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Barak
authors.forename: Dori
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Derdikman
authors.forename: Ehud
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Ahissar
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D000818:Animals; D003198:Computer Simulation; D005073:Evoked Potentials, Somatosensory / Q000502:physiology*; D007699:Kinesthesis / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D008959:Models, Neurological; D010812:Physical Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011312:Pressure; D051381:Rats; D017208:Rats, Wistar; D013314:Stress, Mechanical; D014110:Touch / Q000502:physiology*; D012668:Trigeminal Ganglion / Q000502:physiology*; D014738:Vibrissae / Q000502:physiology*