Sensory input arrives from thalamus in cortical layer (L) 4 and L4 to L2 constitutes one of the earliest cortical feedforward networks. However, the transformation performed by this network remains unknown. This study used two-photon calcium imaging to record neural activity in L2 to L4 of primary vibrissal somatosensory cortex as mice perform an object localization task with two whiskers. For this study, Ai162 x Slc17a7-Cre mice were used in all experiments. This dataset contains supplementary data tied to the publication. The supplementary data includes metadata for all experiments, data for an individual animal, a source from which all data was obtained, data storing size and membership for ensembles, data storing the decoding model scores for each neuron, and raw representation of responses on each trial for each neuron. This study shows from L4 to L2, cortex transitions from distributed probabilistic coding to sparse and robust ensemble-based coding.