Learning-related congruent and incongruent changes of excitation and inhibition in distinct cortical areas

• Published in: PLoS biology Vol. 20; no. 5; p. e3001667
• Main Authors: Esmaeili, Vahid, Oryshchuk, Anastasiia, Asri, Reza, Tamura, Keita, Foustoukos, Georgios, Liu, Yanqi, Guiet, Romain, Crochet, Sylvain, Petersen, Carl C H
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 31-05-2022; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Action potential; Action potentials (Electrophysiology); Action Potentials - physiology; Analysis; Animals; Biology and Life Sciences; Brain; Cortex (somatosensory); Cortical maps; Excitation; Excitation (Physiology); Inhibition (Neurophysiology); Learning; Medicine and Health Sciences; Mice; Motor Cortex - physiology; Motor task performance; Neurons; Neurons - physiology; Normal distribution; Physical Sciences; Physiological aspects; Research and Analysis Methods; Silicon; Social Sciences; Somatosensory Cortex - physiology; Spiking; Vibrissae; Waveforms; Switzerland
• ISSN: 1545-7885; 1544-9173; 1545-7885
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001667

Excitatory and inhibitory neurons in diverse cortical regions are likely to contribute differentially to the transformation of sensory information into goal-directed motor plans. Here, we investigate the relative changes across mouse sensorimotor cortex in the activity of putative excitatory and inhibitory neurons-categorized as regular spiking (RS) or fast spiking (FS) according to their action potential (AP) waveform-comparing before and after learning of a whisker detection task with delayed licking as perceptual report. Surprisingly, we found that the whisker-evoked activity of RS versus FS neurons changed in opposite directions after learning in primary and secondary whisker motor cortices, while it changed similarly in primary and secondary orofacial motor cortices. Our results suggest that changes in the balance of excitation and inhibition in local circuits concurrent with changes in the long-range synaptic inputs in distinct cortical regions might contribute to performance of delayed sensory-to-motor transformation.