INVESTIGADORES
FELICE Carmelo Jose
artículos
Título:
Neural Encoding Schemes of Tactile Information in Afferent Activity of the Vibrissal System
Autor/es:
FARFÁN, FERNANDO DANIEL; ALBARRACÍN, ANA LIA; FELICE CARMELO JOSÉ
Revista:
JOURNAL OF COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE
Editorial:
SPRINGER
Referencias:
Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2012 p. 1 - 13
ISSN:
0929-5313
Resumen:
When
rats acquire sensory information by actively moving their vibrissae, a
neural code is manifested at different levels of the sensory
system. Behavioral studies in tactile discrimination agree that
rats can distinguish different roughness surfaces by whisking their
vibrissae. The present study explores the existence of
neural encoding in the afferent activity of one vibrissal
nerve. Two neural encoding schemes based on ?events? were
proposed (cumulative event count and median inter-event time).
The events were detected by using an event detection
algorithm based on multiscale decomposition of the signal (Continuous
Wavelet Transform). The encoding schemes were
quantitatively evaluated through the maximum amount of
information which was obtained by the Shannon?s
mutual information formula. Moreover, the effect of difference distances
between rat snout and swept surfaces on the information values
was also studied. We found that roughness information was
encoded by events of 0.8 ms duration in the cumulative
event count and event of 1.0 to 1.6 ms duration in the
median inter-event count. It was also observed that an extreme
decrease of the distance between rat snout and swept surfaces
significantly reduces the information values and the capacity to
discriminate among the sweep situations.