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ACTIVATION OF LOW THRESHOLD STRETCH-SENSITIVE RECTAL MECHANORECEPTORS DURING SPONTANEOUS COLONIC MIGRATING MYOELECTRIC

Purpose: The rat whisker-barrel system is structurally well characterised and represents one of the main channels through which rodents collect information about their environment. We used the rat whisker pathway as a model system to investigate the correlation between the response function of cortical neurons and the behaviour of rats in a sensory detection versus discrimination task. Method: In Experiment 1, extracellular recordings were made from neurons in the barrel cortex area of anaesthetised rats (n=16) while applying vibro-tactile stimuli of varying amplitudes to the whiskers. In Experiment 2, rats (n=4) were trained in a behavioural task to select the higher amplitude stimulus between two vibrations applied to their whiskers. This combined detection/discrimination task involved stimuli that were identical to those used in Experiment 1 and thus allowed a direct comparison of the behavioural performances with the neuronal findings. Results: Neurons (n=235) showed a characteristic sigmoidal input/output function with an accelerating non-linearity at low stimulus amplitudes and a compressive nonlinearity at high stimulus amplitudes. An ROC analysis revealed that for near threshold stimuli, the neuronal discrimination performance surpassed the detection performance despite the fact that detection and discrimination represented identical amplitude differences. Similar to neuronal results, the rats’ performance was significantly better for the discrimination task compared to the detection task. The behavioural performance followed a trend that was highly correlated with that of the population of individual neurons. Conclusion: Both behavioral and neuronal data are consistent with the “pedestal effect” previously reported in human psychophysics. FREQUENCY PERCEPTION OF APERIODIC VIBRO-TACTILE STIMULI IN HUMANS CAN NOT BE EXPLAINED BY MEAN DISCHARGE RATE IN ENTRAINED FAST ADAPTING AFFERENTS