RESUMEN
Motion perception is facilitated by the interplay of various sensory channels. In rodents, the cortical areas involved in multisensory motion coding remain to be identified. Using voltage-sensitive-dye imaging, we revealed a visuo-tactile convergent region that anatomically corresponds to the associative parietal cortex (APC). Single unit responses to moving visual gratings or whiskers deflections revealed a specific coding of motion characteristics strikingly found in both sensory modalities. The heteromodality of this region was further supported by a large proportion of bimodal neurons and by a classification procedure revealing that APC carries information about motion features, sensory origin and multisensory direction-congruency. Altogether, the results point to a central role of APC in multisensory integration for motion perception.
Asunto(s)
Percepción de Movimiento/fisiología , Neuronas/fisiología , Lóbulo Parietal/fisiología , Percepción del Tacto/fisiología , Animales , Masculino , Estimulación Luminosa , Ratas Long-Evans , Corteza Somatosensorial/fisiología , Corteza Visual/fisiología , Imagen de Colorante Sensible al VoltajeRESUMEN
Any sensory stimulus evokes a propagating wave of activity in the corresponding sensory cortex that exceeds its topographical boundaries within the primary sensory map. Hama and colleagues (Hama N, Kawai M, Ito S-I, Hirota A. J Neurophysiol 119: 1934-1946, 2018) provided a first study, in the tactile modality, of the interactions between two successively evoked waves. We argue that the difficulty in finding a simple rule to account for all the various observed interactions calls for an effort to clarify the mechanisms and substrates of the propagating waves and their role in sensory processing.