Active and passive touch are differentially represented in the mouse somatosensory thalamus
Fig 2
POm shows pronounced response disparity to active and passive whisker stimuli.
(A) VPM (left) and POm (right) responses to air puffs (“Puff”, teal). Top: heatmaps of individual neuron PSTHs, normalized to baseline before puff and ordered by peak response latency. Bottom: mean population PSTHs, mean whisker angles (orange lines), and mean whisking amplitude over the plotted time range (−25 to 75 ms, orange bars) from recordings shown in the top panel. (B) Same as A but for active touches (“Touch”, yellow). (C) VPM spike rates during baseline and after whisker deflection via Puff or Touch. Baseline: 50 ms windows before, Puff/Touch: 50 ms after deflection. Individual neurons (black: rate increase p < 0.05 (9/15 neurons), dark gray: non-significant (6/15 neurons)) and population means (blue). Inset: pie chart of neurons with positive, negative, and non-significant responses to active touches. (D) Same as C but for POm (purple). Rate increase: 4/11 neurons, rate decrease: 1/11 neurons (light gray), non-significant: 6/11 neurons. (E) Modulation of Puff and Touch spike rates in comparison to baseline. Individual neurons (black) and population means for VPM (blue) and POm (purple), zero modulation indicated by red-dashed line. Asterisks represent p-values (*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001); 2C–2E between conditions: two-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank test; 2E between neuron populations: two-sided Wilcoxon ranked-sum test; Individual neuron comparison (2C, 2D): one-sided (Puff) or two-sided (Touch) Wilcoxon signed-rank test; exact p-values, N numbers in S1 Table. Data and code underlying this figure can be found here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14691035. Source data for panels C, D, E in S1 Data.