Homonculus moteur | EPFL Graph Search

vignette|Lhomuncule moteur. L'homoncule moteur désigne l'organisation de la commande motrice des muscles du corps humain à la surface du cerveau. Le gyrus pré-central (ou circonvolution frontale ascendante) du cortex cérébral est peuplé de grands neurones pyramidaux, dits « cellules de Betz » qui sont le point de départ des axones qui constituent la voie pyramidale. Cette partie du cortex est l'aire 4 de Brodmann. Tout au long de cette aire, il existe une représentation ressemblant à un corps humain déformé, constitué par le fait que si on stimule électriquement un point de cette surface, cela produit un mouvement dans la partie du corps correspondante. On parle de somatotopie fonctionnelle. Chacune des régions de cette aire représente un territoire corporel et cette région corticale a une surface d'autant plus grande que la partie du corps considérée est plus complexe du point de vue de sa motricité. Par exemple, la surface correspondant à la main est très grande, surtout la surfa

Temporal stability of stimulus representation increases along rodent visual cortical hierarchies

Liviu Soltuzu

Cortical representations of brief, static stimuli become more invariant to identity-preserving transformations along the ventral stream. Likewise, increased invariance along the visual hierarchy should imply greater temporal persistence of temporally structured dynamic stimuli, possibly complemented by temporal broadening of neuronal receptive fields. However, such stimuli could engage adaptive and predictive processes, whose impact on neural coding dynamics is unknown. By probing the rat analog of the ventral stream with movies, we uncovered a hierarchy of temporal scales, with deeper areas encoding visual information more persistently. Furthermore, the impact of intrinsic dynamics on the stability of stimulus representations grew gradually along the hierarchy. A database of recordings from mouse showed similar trends, additionally revealing dependencies on the behavioral state. Overall, these findings show that visual representations become progressively more stable along rodent visual processing hierarchies, with an important contribution provided by intrinsic processing. Understanding stability of representation in the visual system can benefit by use of non-static, naturalistic stimuli. Here the authors examine stability of neural representations along the rat ventral stream while viewing naturalistic and synthetic movies.

NATURE RESEARCH2021

Sparse, reliable, and long-term stable representation of periodic whisker deflections in the mouse barrel cortex

Johannes Maria Mayrhofer

The rodent whisker system is a preferred model for studying plasticity in the somatosensory cortex (barrel cortex). Contrarily, only a small amount of research has been conducted to characterize the stability of neuronal population activity in the barrel cortex. We used the mouse whisker system to address the neuronal basis of stable perception in the somatosensory cortex. Cortical representation of periodic whisker deflections was studied in populations of neurons in supragranular layers over extended time periods (up to 3 months) with long-term two-photon Ca2+ imaging in anesthetized mice. We found that inmost of the neurons (87%), Ca2+ responses increased sublinearly with increasing number of contralateral whisker deflections. The imaged population of neurons was activated in a stereotypic way over days and for different deflection rates (pulse frequencies). Thus, pulse frequencies are coded by response strength rather than by distinct neuronal sub-populations. A small population of highly responsive neurons (similar to 3%) was sufficient to decode the whisker stimulus. This conserved functional map, led by a small set of highly responsive neurons, might form the foundation of stable sensory percepts. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Academic Press Inc Elsevier Science2015

Analysis of taste processing in rat gustatory cortex

Riccardo Accolla

Gustatory perception is a complex phenomenon involving the recognition of sensory properties of a food (taste modality and intensity, flavour, texture, fat content, temperature) as well as its reward value (pleasantness and nutritional value). The sense of taste lies at the core of this process and has the fundamental task of guiding the individual towards the decision on which substances to ingest and which others to reject. Remarkable progress has been made through molecular and genetic manipulations in the understanding of the coding of taste at the receptor level. However, much less is known about the cortical processing of taste sensation and the organizing principles of the gustatory cortex (GC). Functional maps are evident in many sensory regions of the neocortex, where neurons are arranged in spatially distinct networks to process sensory inputs. In contrast, in the GC, the existence of functional domains encoding different taste modalities has not been shown yet. In this thesis we used in vivo optical imaging techniques to investigate the functional architecture of the GC in regard to pure taste attributes (modality and intensity) and stimulus hedonic value (or pleasantness). In a first study we found that four of the primary taste modalities (sweet, bitter, salty and sour) are represented by distinctive spatial patterns, but that no region was specific to a single modality. In addition, we found that two tastants of similar hedonic value (pleasant or unpleasant) activated areas with more common regions than two tastants with opposite hedonic value. To better investigate the role of GC in representing the hedonic value, in a second study we coupled intrinsic imaging with conditioned taste aversion (CTA), a learning paradigm whereby a subject learns to avoid a taste stimulus previously associated with visceral malaise. We imaged intrinsic signals from the rat GC after inducing CTA to a pleasant stimulus (saccharin) and compared the resulting map to the response to a naturally unpleasant compound (quinine). Our results show that saccharin maps undergo plastic changes after CTA acquisition and after the extinction of the aversion, although this second change did not seem to reflect a simple reversal of the CTA acquisition. This result would be consistent with the evidence that extinction represents a new state of learning. Interestingly, this GC maps plasticity appears to be strongly correlated with the behavioral changes in the stimulus hedonic value. When saccharin shifts from attractive (Ctrl) to aversive (CTA acquisition) and attractive again (CTA extinction) its cortical representation changes in its relative position with respect to the pattern of the reference aversive stimulus, becoming highly correlated to the quinine pattern only after the CTA acquisition. In summary, we propose that the specific cortical patterns can be used to discriminate among various taste modalities, according to a spatial model of taste coding. We also show that GC maps reshape following conditioned learning induced by an internal state of malaise. Overall the present thesis provides new evidence for the GC as a site where multiple taste attributes are processed, including taste modality, intensity, aversive memory and hedonic value.

EPFL2007

Analysis of taste processing in rat gustatory cortex

Riccardo Accolla

EPFL2007