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Original Research ARTICLE

This article is part of a Research Topic

Behavioral modulation of stimulus-evoked oscillations in barrel cortex of alert rats

Subramaniam Venkatraman¹ and Jose M. Carmena^1,2,3*

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

Program in Cognitive Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

Stimulus-evoked oscillations have been observed in the visual, auditory, olfactory and somatosensory systems. To further our understanding of these oscillations, it is essential to study their occurrence and behavioral modulation in alert, awake animals. Here we show that microstimulation in barrel cortex of alert rats evokes 15–18 Hz oscillations that are strongly modulated by motor behavior. In freely whisking rats, we found that the power of the microstimulation-evoked oscillation in the local field potential was inversely correlated to the strength of whisking. This relationship was also present in rats performing a stimulus detection task suggesting that the effect was not due to sleep or drowsiness. Further, we present a computational model of the thalamocortical loop which recreates the observed phenomenon and predicts some of its underlying causes. These findings demonstrate that stimulus-evoked oscillations are strongly influenced by motor modulation of afferent somatosensory circuits.

Keywords:

evoked oscillations, thalamocortical, cortical microstimulation, behavioral modulation

Citation:

Venkatraman S and Carmena JM (2009). Behavioral modulation of stimulus-evoked oscillations in barrel cortex of alert rats. Front. Integr. Neurosci. 3:10. doi:10.3389/neuro.07.010.2009

Received:

03 March 2009;

Paper pending published:

06 April 2009;

Accepted:

15 May 2009;

Published online:

01 June 2009.

Edited by:

Rui M. Costa, Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Portugal

Reviewed by:

Donald B. Katz, Brandeis University, USA
Joe Paton, Columbia University, USA

© 2009 Venkatraman and Carmena. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence:

Jose M. Carmena, Department of EECS, University of California Berkeley, 517 Cory Hall, MC# 1770, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. e-mail: carmena@eecs.berkeley.edu