RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Environmental Enrichment Sharpens Sensory Acuity by Enhancing Information Coding in Barrel Cortex and Premotor Cortex
JF eneuro
JO eNeuro
FD Society for Neuroscience
SP ENEURO.0309-20.2021
DO 10.1523/ENEURO.0309-20.2021
VO 8
IS 3
A1 He J. V. Zheng
A1 Jesse P. Meagher
A1 Duo Xu
A1 Yogi A. Patel
A1 Daniel H. O’Connor
A1 Hyung-Bae Kwon
YR 2021
UL http://www.eneuro.org/content/8/3/ENEURO.0309-20.2021.abstract
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.