PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Zheng, He J. V.
AU  - Meagher, Jesse P.
AU  - Xu, Duo
AU  - Patel, Yogi A.
AU  - O’Connor, Daniel H.
AU  - Kwon, Hyung-Bae
TI  - Environmental Enrichment Sharpens Sensory Acuity by Enhancing Information Coding in Barrel Cortex and Premotor Cortex
AID  - 10.1523/ENEURO.0309-20.2021
DP  - 2021 May 01
TA  - eneuro
PG  - ENEURO.0309-20.2021
VI  - 8
IP  - 3
4099  - http://www.eneuro.org/content/8/3/ENEURO.0309-20.2021.short
4100  - http://www.eneuro.org/content/8/3/ENEURO.0309-20.2021.full
SO  - eNeuro2021 May 01; 8
AB  - Environmental enrichment (EE) 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 EE enhances the decision-information coding capacity of cells that are tuned to adjacent whiskers, and of premotor cortical cells.