Aligned recordings of neural spiking activity and licking behavior in thirsty mice

Abstract Electrophysiological data, which serve as a biological signal that bridges neural activity and behavioral tasks, provide an innovative approach to neuroscience research. In this study, we constructed a dataset that contains over 2000 neurons across 117 days recorded in 20 mice containing 28,573 trials. Data for 5 mice were collected from the Secondary Motor Cortex (M2) region 8 mice was derived from the Ventrolateral Striatum (VLS) and 7 mice were from Substantia Nigra pars Reticulata (SNR). We induced licking behavior in head-fixed mice by periodically delivering water through a spout while simultaneously recording spiking activity from three brain regions and behavior related electrical signals. This dataset ensures precise temporal alignment between neural activity and behavioral events, offering a robust foundation for investigating neural encoding mechanisms and simulation of neural activities. This dataset establishes a precise spike-to-event mapping, which enables high decoding accuracy using Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). It can serve as a high-quality benchmark for developing encoding and decoding algorithms in neural networks, particularly Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs).