Optical imaging of cortical ensemble activity underlying dynamic whisker stimulation in the awake behaving rat.
Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
Final Report Abstract
In this project, we pursued the question how individual elements of neocortical circuits form stable percepts and generate flexible behaviors in response to a changing sensory environment. We investigated percept formation in the rodent vibrissa system and probed behavioral variability using rats and mice trained on an operant behavioral task with changing contexts. Specifically, we used a simple Go-No-go detection task of varying difficulty by systematically changing the statistical distribution of whisker deflections and the amount of water reward. To measure perceptual adaptation in the brain, we optically recorded membrane voltage across multiple cortical sensory and motor areas with novel genetically encoded voltage sensors (GEVI’s). To our surprise, the initially proposed application of coherent multi whisker stimuli did not influence behavior. Instead, our results show a substantial and reversible shift of the psychometric function towards higher performance levels if the task was dominated by small amplitude deflections of the same whisker. Detection performance changed when the same exact stimulus was presented within a different context, suggesting that the accumulation of reward and therefore the task success could be virtually maintained between difficulty levels. These findings suggest that rodents can adapt their behavioral strategy and dynamically respond to different contexts by forming internal statistical models of a changing sensory environment. Our preliminary wide field imaging results with GEVI’s show that the change in fluorescence and spatial activation of primary somatosensory cortex was modulated by the stimulus distribution and correlated with the animal’s choice and detection sensitivity. We consider this finding to be an important aspect of cortical dynamics with strong implications on adaptive perception and corresponding behavioral flexibility. Hence, we aim to pursue more detailed recording- and optogenetic manipulation experiments across multiple sensory and motor related brain areas in the behaving animal. In addition, we plan to use and extend our simple model of adaptation to predict behavioral performance across a variety of behavioral paradigms and make it available for future psychophysical studies.
Publications
- (2019) Stimulus Context and Reward Contingency Induce Behavioral Adaptation in a Rodent Tactile Detection Task. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 39 (6) 1088–1099
Waiblinger, Christian; Wu, Caroline M.; Bolus, Michael F.; Borden, Peter Y.; Stanley, Garrett B.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2032-18.2018) - (2016) The role of VPm thalamus in whisker related tactile perception. Society of Neuroscience. Session 149 - Somatosensation: Whisker System.149.12 / FF14
C. Waiblinger, C. J. Whitmire, A. J. Sederberg, G. B. Stanley, C. Schwarz
- (2017) Pushing the perceptual boundary towards optimal performance in a detection task with changing stimulus statistics. Society of Neuroscience. Session 224 - Somatosensation: Stimulus Features and Response Properties. 224.03 / AA6
C. Waiblinger, P. Y. Borden, M. F. Bolus, G. B. Stanley
- (2017). Genetically expressed voltage sensor ArcLight for imaging large scale cortical activity in the anesthetized and awake mouse (erratum). Neurophotonics, 4(3), 039801
Borden, P. Y., Ortiz, A. D., Waiblinger, C., Sederberg, A. J., Morrissette, A. E., Forest, C. R., … Stanley, G. B.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1117/1.NPh.4.3.031212) - (2018) Adaptive behavior to changing stimulus statistics in the rodent vibrissa system. FENS European Neuroscience meeting. D.08.b Tactile/somatosensory: Thalamus and Cortex - part V
C. Waiblinger, C. M. Wu, P. Y. Borden, M. F. Bolus, G. B. Stanley
- (2018) Primary Tactile Thalamus Spiking Reflects Cognitive Signals. J Neurosci 38:4870–4885
Waiblinger C, Whitmire CJ, Sederberg A, Stanley GB, Schwarz C
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2403-17.2018)
