Electrophysiology recording from IC whisking sounds
Description
This dataset relates to the Ph.D. thesis of B. Efron for the project: "Detection and Neural Encoding of Whisker-generated Sounds in Mice." The data file is a Matlab structure containing objects of the class expWhisking. The function to define the class is provided with the data. For any questions regarding the data structure format please contact ilan.lampl@weizamnn.ac.il. The data is for the following experiment: To investigate if the sounds that are produced when mice whisk against objects can elicit neuronal activity in the auditory pathway, we attached 6 plunked whiskers to a motor and moved them against objects, emulating natural whisking motions (11 Hz, 30°). We recorded extracellular responses from the IC of anesthetized C57BL/6 mice (n = 2) with their left ear positioned 2 cm from the emulating whisking apparatus with the aim of producing sounds with similar intensity to those produced during natural whisking. Therefore, before recording the neuronal activity, we tuned the emulated whisking (EW) to produce sound intensities similar to the sound that is produced during natural active whisking (AW). Sound amplitudes were comparable between active whisking and emulated whisking at the speed we used. While emulating whisking, we recorded extracellular IC neuronal activity from anesthetized C57BL/6 mice under three conditions: aluminum foil, attenuated foil, and no object. We isolated the spiking activity of 45 units from n=2 mice.