Stimulation of the ventral tegmental area induces visual cortical plasticity at the neuronal level.

Autor:	Herpers J; Laboratory for Neuro- and Psychophysiology, Department of Neurosciences, KU Leuven Medical School, 3000 Leuven, Belgium; Leuven Brain Institute, KU Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium., Arsenault JT; Laboratory for Neuro- and Psychophysiology, Department of Neurosciences, KU Leuven Medical School, 3000 Leuven, Belgium; Leuven Brain Institute, KU Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium., Vanduffel W; Laboratory for Neuro- and Psychophysiology, Department of Neurosciences, KU Leuven Medical School, 3000 Leuven, Belgium; Leuven Brain Institute, KU Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium; Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA; Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02144, USA., Vogels R; Laboratory for Neuro- and Psychophysiology, Department of Neurosciences, KU Leuven Medical School, 3000 Leuven, Belgium; Leuven Brain Institute, KU Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. Electronic address: rufin.vogels@kuleuven.be.
Jazyk:	angličtina
Zdroj:	Cell reports [Cell Rep] 2021 Nov 09; Vol. 37 (6), pp. 109998.
DOI:	10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109998
Abstrakt:	fMRI studies have shown that pairing a task-irrelevant visual feature with electrical micro-stimulation of the ventral tegmental area (VTA-EM) is sufficient to increase the sensory cortical representation of the paired feature and to improve perceptual performance. However, since fMRI provides an indirect measure of neural activity, the neural response changes underlying the fMRI activations are unknown. Here, we pair a task-irrelevant grating orientation with VTA-EM while attention is directed to a difficult orthogonal task. We examine the changes in neural response properties in macaques by recording spiking activity in the posterior inferior temporal cortex, the locus of fMRI-defined plasticity in previous studies. We observe a relative increase in mean spike rate and preference for the VTA-EM paired orientation compared to an unpaired orientation, which is unrelated to attention. These results demonstrate that VTA-EM-stimulus pairing is sufficient to induce sensory cortical plasticity at the spiking level in nonhuman primates. Competing Interests: Declaration of interests The authors declare no competing interests. (Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)
Databáze:	MEDLINE
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