INVESTIGADORES
FELICE Carmelo Jose
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Temporal Patterns Related to the Texture Discrimination Coding in the Rat Vibrissal System
Autor/es:
ALBARRACÍN, ANA LIA; FARFÁN, FERNANDO DANIEL; FELICE, CARMELO JOSÉ
Lugar:
Ashburn
Reunión:
Conferencia; Janelia Conferences; 2010
Institución organizadora:
Janelia Farm
Resumen:
Studies
in tactile discrimination agree that rats are able to learn a rough-smooth
discrimination task by actively touching (whisking) objects with their
vibrissae. This behavior induces specific patterns of temporal encoding at
different levels of the whisker pathway.
In
the present work we analyzed the multifiber
afferent discharge of one vibrissal nerve during active whisking. Vibrissa
movements were induced by electrical stimulation of motor branches of the
facial nerve. We used sandpapers of different grain size as roughness
discrimination surfaces and we also consider the change pressure as a way to
improve the tactile information acquisition. We propose here two methods to
analyze the multifiber activity: the RMS values and the
Inter-event time (IET) analysis. The last allows us extracting temporal
patterns or 'events' related to texture discrimination coding. We also obtained
three parameters (Ra, Rz and DBLP- Distance Between Local Peaks) that characterized
the roughness surfaces.
The
results showed that as roughness increased, the RMS values also increased in
almost all cases, thus suggesting a direct relation. In addition, we observed a
better discrimination performance in the retraction phase. Finally, we related
the IET obtained with the physical characteristic of the surfaces. We concluded
that temporal patterns found in the multifiber
activity of a single vibrissa innervation
would be related with the texture coding and that the DBLP would be the better
parameter described by these patterns.