Environmental enrichment sharpens sensory acuity by enhancing information coding in barrel cortex and premotor cortex

Abstract

Environmental enrichment is beneficial to sensory functions. Thus, elucidating the neural mechanism underlying improvement of sensory stimulus discrimination is important for developing therapeutic strategies. We aim to advance the understanding of such neural mechanism. We found that tactile enrichment improved tactile stimulus feature discrimination. The neural correlate of such improvement was revealed by analyzing single-cell information coding in both the primary somatosensory cortex and the premotor cortex of awake behaving animals. Our results show that environmental enrichment enhances the decision-information coding capacity of cells that are tuned to adjacent whiskers, and of premotor cortical cells.

Significance statement

This study advances the understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying the improvement of tactile discrimination induced by tactile environmental enrichment. We demonstrate that enrichment improves the information-coding capacity of adjacent-whisker tuned cells in the barrel cortex and premotor cortex, in awake animals performing a single whisker discrimination task. This understanding contributes to the development of therapeutic strategies for sensory function improvement utilizing environmental enrichment, which is a promising non-invasive therapy for many neurodegenerative diseases and traumatic brain injury and stroke recovery.