A Mouse's World View, Seen Through its Whiskers (VIDEO)
Caption
Many neurons are activated in layers 2 and 3 of the cortex (left) when a mouse's whiskers encounter an object (black dot in right image). After conducting experiments in which a vertical pole was placed in various positions relative to the mouse's face, researchers found that the position of the object was represented by a smooth map in the cortex. When researchers trimmed the whiskers down to one, the representation in the cortex was no longer smooth, showing that this layer of the somatosensory cortex was integrating information from all whiskers to create a map of the space around the mouse's head.
Credit
Video by Evan Lyall and Hillel Adesnik, UC Berkeley.
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