Topic: layer 2/3 excitatory neurons

How do we learn about experiences while being removed from the experience itself? One solution involves offline learning via reactivations. Sensory reactivation involves the recurrence of a pattern of neural activity during sleep or quiet waking that previously occurred during a sensory experience. Historically, reactivations have been studied in the hippocampus. However, whether reactivations in sensory cortex depend on local activation of neurons during prior experience is not well understood. We hypothesize that such reactivations in sensory association cortex could be important for learnin

Perceptual learning has been associated with altered sensory cortical representations in trained animals relative to naive ones. While there is substantial variability across animals in the degree of behavioral learning and the associated changes in neural representations, we lack an account of how experiences during learning may drive these differences. Here we address this question in the context of an auditory learning task, by combining experiments and computational modeling. Mice were progressively trained to classify tones as a single, center frequency or non-center by licking left or ri