Extracellular recordings in mouse barrel cortex during single- and 2-whisker stimulation.

The data set consists of acute extracellular recordings in primary whisker somatosensory cortex (S1) of awake and anesthetized mice during passive whisker stimulation, delivered with a 3x3 array of piezoelectric actuators. The recording electrode was placed in the cortical column corresponding to the whisker in the center of the array; thus, the stimulated whiskers were the columnar whisker (CW) of the column being recorded and 8 surrounding whiskers (SWs). Neural activity is described by the spike times of isolated single units obtained from spike sorting. We performed 3 experiments with different stimulus sets and behavioral conditions. Experiment 1 was performed in anesthetized mice and consisted of 261 unique stimuli; 9 single-whisker deflections and 252 2-whisker sequences (that is, 9 choose 2 spatial combinations, each of which was delivered at 7 inter-whisker-deflection-intervals (Δt’s): 0, ±10, ±25 and ± 50ms) (see Fig. 1a of paper). Experiment 2 was also in anesthetized mice and had a total of 3000 unique stimuli; 18 single-whisker deflections (9 whiskers with peak deflection amplitude in either the rostral or caudal direction), 1600 CW-SW sequences (8 correlated and 8 anti-correlated CW-SW combinations at 100 Δt’s within ± 50 ms range) and 1400 SW-SW sequences (7 correlated and 7 anti-correlated SW-SW combinations at 100 Δt’s within ± 50 ms range). Only SW-SW combinations that involved the SW located rostral and within the same row as the CW were presented. Experiment 3 was done in awake mice performing a simple visual detection task where mice licked in response to a flash of blue light — this allowed us to deliver calibrated whisker deflections in awake mice. The stimulus set consisted of 9 single-whisker deflections and all correlated CW-SW and SW-SW combinations at an inter-whisker-deflection-interval of -40, 0 and +40 ms. These data are the basis for the following paper, which contains a detailed description of the methods and results:
Laboy-Juárez KJ, Langberg T, Ahn S & Feldman DE. (2019) Elementary motion sequence detectors in whisker somatosensory cortex. (in press — Nature Neuroscience).