Active dendritic integration and mixed neocortical network representations during an adaptive sensing behavior

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Sensory processing
• Motor control

Background:

• Animals actively scan environments for accurate perception.
• Neuronal representations underlying active sensing are not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate neuronal representations mediating adaptive sensing behaviors.
• Determine the role of layer 5 pyramidal neurons in the vibrissae cortex during active sensing.

Main Methods:

• Calcium (Ca2+) imaging in awake mice performing an active sensing task.
• Selective optogenetic manipulation of neuronal activity.
• Analysis of single-neuron and population-level neural encoding.

Main Results:

• Layer 5 pyramidal neurons in the vibrissae cortex exhibit diverse and distributed representations.
• Optogenetic perturbation impaired single-neuron selectivity and network encoding.
• Impairment resulted from inhibited active dendritic integration.

Conclusions:

• Active dendritic integration in pyramidal neurons generates a nonlinearly mixed network representation.
• This representation integrates sensorimotor parameters for adaptive behavior.
• The layer 5 cortical circuit motif may support general circuit computations for sensorimotor transformations.