%0 Journal Article
%T Active dendritic integration and mixed neocortical network representations during an adaptive sensing behavior
%J -
%D 2018
%R https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-018-0254-6
%X Animals strategically scan the environment to form an accurate perception of their surroundings. Here we investigated the neuronal representations that mediate this behavior. Ca2+ imaging and selective optogenetic manipulation during an active sensing task reveals that layer 5 pyramidal neurons in the vibrissae cortex produce a diverse and distributed representation that is required for mice to adapt their whisking motor strategy to changing sensory cues. The optogenetic perturbation degraded single-neuron selectivity and network population encoding through a selective inhibition of active dendritic integration. Together the data indicate that active dendritic integration in pyramidal neurons produces a nonlinearly mixed network representation of joint sensorimotor parameters that is used to transform sensory information into motor commands during adaptive behavior. The prevalence of the layer 5 cortical circuit motif suggests that this is a general circuit computation
%U https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-018-0254-6