Time-Frequency analisys for patterns detection of neural code on multifiber recordings

PIZÁ GABRIEL; FARFÁN, FERNANDO DANIEL; ALBARRACÍN, ANA LIA; FELICE, CARMELO JOSÉ

Huerta Grande

Congreso; Reunión Satélite: Bases Neurales de la Conducta: Neuroetología y Neurobiologia de la Memoria en el Cono Sur; 2013

Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias

The vibrissae system is mainly formed by vibrissae or tactile hairs (located at both sides of the animal?s snout) through which obtain tactile information. Such information transduction occurs in vibrissae follicles, while transmission is performed by the trigeminal nerve (peripheral) to the brainstem, soon to take various paths to the thalamus and cortex. Electrophysiological and behavioral studies in tactile discrimination agree in that the rats can distinguish surfaces of different roughness by whisking their vibrissae. Currently, tactile discrimination studies involve experimental protocols with high degree of specificity (simple stimuli, single-cell recordings in very specific places on the sensorial path), decreasing the big amount of involved variables in this complex sensorial task. With this, the inference of the results to the functional understanding of the system, may be complex. This work has proposed to implement a experimental protocol to capture the afferent information of the vibrissae innervation between different frictional situations (complex stimulus). An alternate method has been proposed to analyze the tactile information in the afferent nerves based on time-frequency plots and statistical methods. These procedures allowed to infer about possible codification schemes and the discrimination degree at peripheral level. The method´s results proposed were compared with the ones obtained from others authors showing the advantages and disadvantages of itself.