Temporal frequency of whisker movement. I. Representations in brain stem and thalamus.

How does processing of information change the internal representations used in subsequent stages of sensory pathways? To approach this question, we studied the representations of whisker movements in the lemniscal and paralemniscal pathways of the rat vibrissal system. We recently suggested that these two pathways encode movement frequency in different ways. We proposed that paralemniscal thalamocortical circuits, functioning as phase-locked loops (PLLs), translate temporally coded information into a rate code. Here we focus on the two major trigeminal nuclei of the brain stem, nucleus principalis and subnucleus interpolaris, and on their thalamic targets, the ventral posteromedial nucleus (VPM) and the medial division of the posterior nucleus (POm). This is the first study in which these brain stem and thalamic nuclei were explored together in the same animals and using the same stimuli. We studied both single- and multi-unit activity. We moved the whiskers both mechanically and by air puffs; here we present air-puff-induced movements because they are more similar to natural movements than movements induced by mechanical stimulations. We describe the basic properties of the responses in these brain stem and thalamic nuclei. The responses in both brain stem nuclei were similar; responses to air puffs were mostly tonic and followed the trajectory of whisker movement. The responses in the two thalamic nuclei were similar during low-frequency stimulations or during the first pulses of high-frequency stimulations, exhibiting more phasic responses than those of brain stem neurons. However, with frequencies >2 Hz, VPM and POm responses differed, generating different representations of the stimulus frequency. In the VPM, response amplitudes (instantaneous firing rates) and spike counts (total number of spikes per stimulus cycle) decreased as a function of the frequency. In the POm, latencies increased and spike count decreased as a function of the frequency. Having described the basic response properties in the four nuclei, we then focus on a specific test of our PLL hypothesis for coding in the paralemniscal pathway. We used short-duration air puffs, much shorter than whisker movements during natural whisking. The activity in this situation was consistent with the prediction we made on the basis of the PLL hypothesis.