Topic: vS1

An animal’s ability to respond to its environment relies on effectively decoding neural representations of sensory stimuli. While it is known that primary sensory cortices represent sensory stimuli through specific patterns of activity, it is unknown how these representations are preserved over time. Many primary and higher order cortices have been shown to exhibit changes in neural activity representing the same sensory stimuli even when behavior is stable, a process dubbed ‘representational drift’. This poses a critical challenge for the brain – how can animals maintain stable perception and

In the mouse whisker system, somatosensory thalamus outputs to primary and secondary vibrissal somatosensory cortices (vS1 and vS2), as well as the dysgranular zone, a strip of cortex between the vibrissal and forepaw primary somatosensory cortices. Despite extensive studies of vS1 and vS2, the dysgranular zone’s response to whisker touch remains unknown. Vibrissal S1 sends outputs to three areas within the dysgranular zone: the anteromedial (AM), centromedial (CM), and posteromedial (PM) areas, each of which shows robust responses to whisker touch. We trained mice trimmed to two whiskers to a