PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Michael Bale
AU  - Malamati Bitzidou
AU  - Anna Pitas
AU  - Leonie Brebner
AU  - Lina Khazim
AU  - Stavros Anagnou
AU  - Caitlin Stevenson
AU  - Miguel Maravall
TI  - Learning and recognition of tactile temporal sequences by mice and humans
AID  - 10.1101/122887
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 122887
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/31/122887.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/31/122887.full
AB  - The world around us is replete with stimuli that unfold over time. When we hear an auditory stream like music or speech or scan a texture with our fingertip, physical features in the stimulus are concatenated in a particular order, and this temporal patterning is critical to interpreting the stimulus. To explore the capacity of mice and humans to learn tactile sequences, we developed a task in which subjects had to recognise a continuous modulated noise sequence delivered to whiskers or fingertips, defined by its temporal patterning over hundreds of milliseconds. GO and NO-GO sequences differed only in that the order of their constituent noise modulation segments was temporally scrambled. Both mice and humans efficiently performed tactile sequence learning. Mouse performance relied mainly on detecting relative changes in noise amplitude over time, whereas humans appeared to have access to more cues, including the duration of noise modulation segments.