Topic: somatosensory input

The lateral septum (LS) demonstrates activation in response to pup exposure in rat mothers, and its lesions eliminate maternal behaviors suggesting its involvement in maternal brain circuitry. This study shows that the density of pup-activated neurons in the ventral subdivision of the LS (LSv) is nearly equivalent to that in the medial preoptic area (MPOA), the major regulatory site of maternal behavior. When somatosensory inputs including suckling are not allowed, pup-induced activation was markedly reduced in the LSv. Retrograde tract tracing identified various brain regions potentially infl

Integration of information across different senses is a common property of cortical neurons. Somatosensory input impacts on auditory cortical processing through a mechanism that suppresses sound-evoked activity (Lohse et al., 2021). We carried out a number of experiments to investigate a) the perceptual implications of this crossmodal integrative process and b) its context dependence. In order to assess whether somatosensory suppression of sound-evoked activity affected the ability of mice to detect acoustic stimuli, we first performed a near-threshold sound detection experiment. While simulta