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Summary: Acetylcholine-dependent potentiation of temporal frequency
representation in the barrel cortex does not depend
on response magnitude during conditioning
Daniel E. Shulz a,*, Valerie Ego-Stengel a
, Ehud Ahissar b
a
Unite de Neurosciences Integratives et Computationnelles, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut de Neurobiologie Alfred Fessard,
1 Avenue de la Terrasse, 91198 Gif sur Yvette, France
b
Department of Neurobiology, The Weizmann Institute of Science, 76100 Rehovot, Israel
Abstract
The response properties of neurons of the postero-medial barrel sub-field of the somatosensory cortex (the cortical structure
receiving information from the mystacial vibrissae can be modified as a consequence of peripheral manipulations of the afferent
activity. This plasticity depends on the integrity of the cortical cholinergic innervation, which originates at the nucleus basalis
magnocellularis (NBM). The activity of the NBM is related to the behavioral state of the animal and the putative cholinergic
neurons are activated by specific events, such as reward-related signals, during behavioral learning. Experimental studies on ace-
tylcholine (ACh)-dependent cortical plasticity have shown that ACh is needed for both the induction and the expression of plastic
modifications induced by sensorycholinergic pairings. Here we review and discuss ACh-dependent plasticity and activity-dependent
plasticity and ask whether these two mechanisms are linked. To address this question, we analyzed our data and tested whether
changes mediated by ACh were activity-dependent. We show that ACh-dependent potentiation of response in the barrel cortex of
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