Touch-based object recognition relies on perception of compositional tactile features like roughness, shape, and surface orientation. However, besides roughness, it remains unclear how these different tactile features are encoded by neural activity that is linked with perception. Here, we establish a cortex-dependent perceptual task in which mice discriminate tactile gratings on the basis of orientation using only their whiskers. Multielectrode recordings in the barrel cortex reveal weak orientation tuning in average firing rates (500-ms time scale) during grating exploration despite high levels of cortical activity. Just before decision, orientation information extracted from fast cortical dynamics (100-ms time scale) more closely resembles concurrent psychophysical measurements than single neuron orientation tuning curves. This temporal code conveys both stimulus and choice/action-related information, suggesting that fast cortical dynamics during exploration of a tactile object both reflect the physical stimulus and affect the decision.

中文翻译：

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快速皮层动力学在主动触摸期间编码触觉光栅方向

基于触摸的对象识别依赖于对粗糙度、形状和表面方向等组合触觉特征的感知。然而，除了粗糙度之外，尚不清楚这些不同的触觉特征是如何被与感知相关的神经活动编码的。在这里，我们建立了一个依赖于皮层的感知任务，其中小鼠仅使用它们的胡须根据方向来区分触觉光栅。尽管皮质活动水平很高，但桶状皮质中的多电极记录显示，在光栅探索期间，平均发射率（500 毫秒时间尺度）的方向调整很弱。就在决策之前，从快速皮层动力学（100 毫秒时间尺度）中提取的方向信息更接近于同时进行的心理物理测量，而不是单个神经元方向调整曲线。