DOI: 10.5061/dryad.4j0zpc8n0
title: Data from: Attentional modulation of secondary somatosensory and visual thalamus of mice

description: Each sensory modality has its own primary and secondary thalamic nuclei.
 While the primary thalamic nuclei are well understood to relay sensory
 information from the periphery to the cortex, the role of secondary
 sensory nuclei is elusive. One hypothesis has been that secondary nuclei
 may support feature-based attention. If this is true, one would also
 expect the activity in different nuclei to reflect the degree to which
 modalities are or are not behaviorally relevant in a task. We trained
 head-fixed mice to attend to one sensory modality while ignoring a second
 modality, namely to attend to touch and ignore vision, or vice versa.
 Arrays were used to record simultaneously from secondary somatosensory
 thalamus (POm) and secondary visual thalamus (LP). In mice trained to
 respond to tactile stimuli and ignore visual stimuli, POm was robustly
 activated by touch and largely unresponsive to visual stimuli. A different
 pattern was observed when mice were trained to respond to visual stimuli
 and ignore touch, with POm now more robustly activated during visual
 trials. This POm activity was not explained by differences in movements
 (i.e., whisking, licking, pupil dilation) resulting from the two tasks.
 Post hoc histological reconstruction of array tracks through POm revealed
 that subregions varied in their degree of plasticity. LP exhibited similar
 phenomena. We conclude that behavioral training reshapes activity in
 secondary thalamic nuclei. Secondary nuclei may respond to behaviorally
 relevant, reward-predicting stimuli regardless of stimulus modality.
description: Electrophysiology and behavior data was acquired with OpenEphys.
 Electrophysiology data was preprocessed with Kilosort3 and Phy. Behavior
 data was preprocessed with custom MATLAB software. 
description: # Data from: Attentional modulation of secondary somatosensory and visual
 thalamus of mice
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4j0zpc8n0](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4j0zpc8n0) ## Description of the data and file structure This dataset is comprised of three MATLAB .mat files: \- ConditioningLearningCurveData.mat \- RecordingDayBehaviorData.mat \- RecordingDayNeuralData.mat **1) ConditioningLearningCurveData.mat** Measurements of performance on a conditioning task where mice were trained to associate visual or tactile stimuli with a water reward. This file contains a 23x9 table titled "LearningCurveTable." Each row corresponds to a single mouse. The table has the following fields: \- MouseID: The unique identifier for each mouse. \- ExperimentType: The type of task the mouse was conditioned on, either "Visual" or "Tactile" \- Sex: Animal sex (M: male | F: female) \- nSessions: The number of sessions a mouse was conditioned on, including the final day of conditioning when neural recordings were performed. \- ConditioningType: A string vector indicating whether a particular conditioning session was a "shaping" session or "full" session. \- MeanLI_Airpuff: A vector containing the mean lick index for the tactile stimulus (whisker air puff) on each conditioning session. \- MeanLI_Grating: A vector containing the mean lick index for the visual stimulus (drifting grating on a screen) on \- pVal_AirPuff: The p-value of a signed-rank test of whether the air puff lick index was significantly different from zero. \- pVal_Grating: The p-value of a signed-rank test of whether the drifting grating lick index was significantly different from zero. For all vectors in this table, the nth element of that vector corresponds to the nth conditioning session for that mouse. The last element corresponds to the session when neural recordings were collected. Lick index is a measure of how much a mouse's lick rate responded to a given stimulus. A positive number indicates that the mouse increased its lick rate, and a negative number indicates that it decreased its lick rate. See associated publication for more detail. **2) RecordingDayBehaviorData.mat** Measurements of mouse behavior and task variables on the final session of the conditioning task. Neural recordings were recorded simultaneously and are detailed in the next section. This file contains a 23x10 table titled "RecordingDayBehaviorDataTable", with each row corresponding to measurements from a single mouse. It has the following fields: \- MouseID: The unique identifier for each mouse. \- ExperimentType: The type of task the mouse was conditioned on, either "Visual" or "Tactile" \- Sex: Animal sex (M: male | F: female) The remaining fields contain data vectors for each of the behavior and task variables recorded. Each vector has been sampled at 1kHz. Within-mouse measurements are the same length and are aligned in time, data between mice are of different lengths. \- Airpuff: A boolean vector indicating whether the tactile stimulus (an air puff to the whiskers) was on. (True: on | False: off). \- VisualStim: A boolean vector indicating whether the visual stimulus (a drifting grating on a screen) was on. (True: grating on | False: blank screen) \- Reward: A boolean vector indicating whether the water reward was being delivered. (True: on | False: off) \- Lick: A boolean vector indicating whether the infrared lick sensor detected a lick. (True: lick detected | False: no lick). \- WhiskerAngle_deg: The mean angle of the mouse's whiskers in degrees, relative to the surface of the face. Larger angles indicate whisker protraction, smaller angles represent retraction. Only the right side of the face was measured (contralateral to neural recordings). \- WhiskingAmplitude_deg: Whisking amplitude in degrees. Amplitude is defined as the difference in most protracted and most retracted whisker position on each whisking cycle. \- PupilRadius_px: The radius of the pupil on the right side of the face, measured in pixels. **3) RecordingDayNeuralData.mat** Multielectrode silicon array recordings of POm and LP cells in mice performing the conditioning task. Recordings were performed simultaneous to the measurements in RecordingDayBehaviorData.mat. This file contains a 735x6 table titled "SpikeDataTable", where each row corresponds to a single cell (also termed a "spike cluster"). The table has the following fields: \- MouseID: The mouse that this cell was recorded from. \- ClusterID: An arbitrary numeric identifier for this cell. Note that cluster IDs are unique within a mouse but not across mice. Each cell can thus be uniquely identified by the combination of MouseID and ClusterID. \- Region: The brain region the cell was recorded from, either POm or LP. \- Depth_um: The depth from the cortical surface that the cell was located, measured in micrometers. \- Coordinates_atlas_xyz: A 1x3 numeric vector representing the position in 3D space that the cell was located, relative to the Allen Common Reference Atlas. Measured in decimeters, the same unit as the reference atlas. \- SpikeTimes_ms: A numeric vector of time stamps indicating when a spike was recorded. Spike times are aligned to the data vectors in RecordingDayBehaviorData.mat.