Active and passive touch are differentially represented in the mouse somatosensory thalamus
Fig 4
Dependence of thalamic responses to active and passive whisker deflections on whisker kinematics and intervals.
(A) Distribution of absolute angular acceleration during (±25 ms) touch (yellow) and puff (teal). Joint distribution divided into acceleration tertiles (gray-shaded bars). (B) Modulation in response to puff (teal) and touch (yellow) split by acceleration tertiles indicated in A for VPM (left) and POm (right). (C) Smoothed VPM (left) and POm (right) population mean PSTHs split by tertiles (shades of gray) indicated in A for puff (top) and touch stimuli (bottom). (D–F) Same as in A–C but splitting deflection events into tertiles of whisker curvature following whisker deflection (0–25 ms). (G–I) Same as in A–C but splitting deflection events into tertiles based on intervals between whisker deflections. (J) Responses to 1st vs. subsequent touches within a bout. Individual neurons (black) and population means for VPM (blue, left, n = 10) and POm (purple, right, n = 10). Baseline: 50 ms windows before 1st touch in bout, Touch: 50 ms after. Only neurons with at least 10 touches in each condition were included. Asterisks represent significance (*p < 0.05); 4B, 4E, 4H within condition: one-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank, between tertiles and conditions: two-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank test; exact p-values in S2 Table. Data and code underlying this figure can be found here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14691035. Source data for panels B, E, H, J in S3 Data.