Impairment of the discrimination of the direction of single-whisker stimulation induced by the lemniscal pathway lesion

In the rodent somatosensory system, stimulus information received by the whiskers is relayed to the barrel cortex via two parallel pathways, the lemniscal pathway and the paralemniscal pathway. The lemniscal pathway includes the principal trigeminal nucleus (Pr5) and the ventral posteromedial thalamic nucleus (VPm). The paralemniscal pathway includes the spinal trigeminal subnucleus interpolaris (Sp5i) and the medial division of posterior thalamic nucleus (POm). The purpose of this study was to investigate the roles of those pathways in perceptions of the direction of the single-whisker stimulation in the rat. Rats were trained to perform a go/no-go task that required the discrimination of forward or backward stimulation applied to their single whisker. When a selective lesion was made in VPm or Pr5, error rate for the task performance increased significantly. In contrast, when a selective lesion was made in POm or Sp5i, we found no significant change in performance. These results suggest that the lemniscal pathway plays more important roles in a discrimination of stimulus direction applied to the single whisker.