Cortical Mechanisms of Attention, Discrimination, and Motor Response toSomesthetic Stimuli

摘要

Work carried out on AFOSR 90-0266 made major progress in several areas,including: (1) Development of technology for recording large numbers of single neurons (up to 64) simultaneously through microwires implanted at multiple levels of the somatosensory system in awake rats; (2) utilization of an operant conditioning paradigm for investigating the detection and processing of sensory cues which trigger an active motor response; (3) demonstration that neuronal responses in the SI and MI cortices to such sensory cues are increased when they are used to trigger a conditioned motor response; (4) demonstration that this conditioning increases the prevalence of functional connections between neurons in the SI and MI cortices; (5) used quantitative techniques to defined dynamic and distributed properties of receptive fields in the somatosensory cortex and thalamus; (6) developed the use of multivariate statistical techniques to define population coding within ensembles of recorded neurons; and (7) Continued to define neuroanatomical substrates for processing within this system.