High-frequency whisker vibration is encoded by phase-locked responses of neurons in the rat's barrel cortex

Rats perform texture discrimination during tactile exploration with their whiskers with high spatial and temporal precision. Although the peripheral mechanoreceptors provide tactile information with exquisite temporal resolution, physiological studies have suggested that this information might be lost at the cortical level. To address this discrepancy, multiunit and single-unit recordings were performed in the barrel cortex of isoflurane-anesthetized rats using continuous sinusoidal vibration of single whiskers at 15-700 Hz. In multiunit recordings, sustained phase-locked responses occurred up to vibration frequencies of 700 Hz, and 1:1 stimulus locking was observed up to 320 Hz. Wide-band responses of multiunits showed frequency encoding between 20 and 320 Hz. The discharge rates were not different for stimuli in the low- and high-frequency ranges, but they were significantly lower for non-phase-locked responses to high-frequency vibration. Response adaptation was present in only 25% of the cases, whereas in the majority of cases, entrainment to the vibratory frequency remained constant or even increased with stimulus duration. Increased entrainment to high-frequency stimulation was accompanied by the emergence of induced activity in the gamma-band range. Analysis of single-unit activity revealed that phase locking to vibratory stimuli was more precise than that observed for the multiunit responses. The results show that whisker vibrations at frequencies above 100 Hz are faithfully encoded by sustained phase-locked responses of cortical neurons under isoflurane anesthesia. It is conceivable that the awake animal makes use of the tactile signals at even much higher frequencies, which can be provided by the peripheral mechanoreceptors during texture discrimination.