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Thalamic synchrony and the adaptive gating of information flow to cortex

Nature Neuroscience volume 13, pages 1534–1541 (2010)Cite this article

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Abstract

Although it has long been posited that sensory adaptation serves to enhance information flow in sensory pathways, the neural basis remains elusive. Simultaneous single-unit recordings in the thalamus and cortex in anesthetized rats showed that adaptation differentially influenced thalamus and cortex in a manner that fundamentally changed the nature of information conveyed about vibrissa motion. Using an ideal observer of cortical activity, we found that performance in detecting vibrissal deflections degraded with adaptation while performance in discriminating among vibrissal deflections of different velocities was enhanced, a trend not observed in thalamus. Analysis of simultaneously recorded thalamic neurons did reveal, however, an analogous adaptive change in thalamic synchrony that mirrored the cortical response. An integrate-and-fire model using experimentally measured thalamic input reproduced the observed transformations. The results here suggest a shift in coding strategy with adaptation that directly controls information relayed to cortex, which could have implications for encoding velocity signatures of textures.

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Figure 1: Statistical properties of cortical response adapt to vibrissa deflections.
Figure 2: Adaptation degrades stimulus detection for ideal observer of cortical activity.
Figure 3: Adaptation enhances cortical discriminability.
Figure 4: Cortical performance does not trivially mirror activity of thalamic projections.
Figure 5: Shift in discrimination performance is maintained in monosynaptically connected thalamocortical pairs.
Figure 6: Thalamic population synchrony is modulated by adaptation.
Figure 7: Thalamocortical network model predictions.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Jose-Manuel Alonso for comments at various points of this work and Daniel Millard for assistance in calibration and testing of the piezoelectric stimulator. This work was supported by the US National Institutes of Health (R01NS48285).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology & Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Qi Wang & Garrett B Stanley

  2. School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    Qi Wang

  3. Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Roxanna M Webber

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Contributions

Q.W. and G.B.S. conceived the study. Q.W., R.M.W. and G.B.S. designed the experiments. Q.W. performed the experiments. Q.W. and G.B.S. analyzed the data, and Q.W., R.M.W. and G.B.S. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Garrett B Stanley.

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Wang, Q., Webber, R. & Stanley, G. Thalamic synchrony and the adaptive gating of information flow to cortex. Nat Neurosci 13, 1534–1541 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2670

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