Studying the role of spike timing in ensembles of neurons

The aim of this project is to study how ensembles of neurons in the rat somatosensory cortex integrate the temporal precision of the spikes and the spatial precision of the anatomical connections into sophisticated strategies of neural coding. This paper brings together the main results we obtained so far. We first developed a simple and efficient method - the PSTH-based classifier - to decode somatosensory information using ensembles of single neurons (Foffani and Moxon, J Neurosci Methods 2004). We then applied the new method to study the role of spike timing as a general property of the rat primary somatosensory cortex (Foffani, Tutunculer, Moxon, J Neurosci 2004). We conclude that the somatosensory system not only translates spatial information from the body into somatotopic responses in the brain, but also transforms this spatial information into spike timing precision