AUTHOR=Alwis Dasuni S., Rajan Ramesh TITLE=Environmental enrichment causes a global potentiation of neuronal responses across stimulus complexity and lamina of sensory cortex JOURNAL=Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience VOLUME=7 YEAR=2013 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cellular-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fncel.2013.00124 DOI=10.3389/fncel.2013.00124 ISSN=1662-5102 ABSTRACT=
Enriched social and physical housing produces many molecular, anatomical, electrophysiological and behavior benefits even in adult animals. Much less is known of its effects on cortical electrophysiology, especially in how sensory cortex encodes the altered environment, and extant studies have generally been restricted to neurons in input laminae in sensory cortex. To extend the understanding of how an enriched environment alters the way in which cortex views the world, we investigated enrichment-induced changes in neuronal encoding of sensory stimuli across all laminae of the rat barrel cortex receiving input from the face whisker tactile system. Animals were housed in Enriched (