Fig 1. Experimental setup, behavior, and recordings.

(A) Sketches of texture discrimination task. Left panel: the rat extends forward to identify the textured plate using its whiskers. Right panel: having identified the stimulus, the rat withdraws from the center and collects the reward at the left spout. (B) Photograph of texture S3, a Plexiglas plate with vertical grooves of 1 mm width and depth cut at intervals of 2 mm. (C) Sensorimotor behavior on a typical trial is characterized by four frames from high-speed video: approach (head, body, and whiskers all move forward), onset of first contact, inter contact (whiskers are retracted and detached from texture prior to the subsequent protraction and contact), and withdrawal (whiskers are retracted and rat’s head and body move backwards onto the platform). (D) Coordinate system to quantify whisking angle in the automatic whisker tracking program. (E) Simultaneous measurement of CA1 LFP and whisker mean angle extracted from a typical trial. Black line, LFP; blue line, left whiskers; red line, right whiskers. Whisking angle refers to coordinate system in D. (F) Raster plot of the spikes of a barrel cortex unit across trials from a single session. Trials are not labeled according to the stimulus. Spike trains are aligned to the onset of first contact, denoted 0 s. All data are available at http://figshare.com/s/99b31b8a567f11e5b81d06ec4bbcf141.