Natural Whisker-Guided Behavior by Head-Fixed Mice in Tactile Virtual Reality

Natural whisker-guided behavior by head-fixed mice in tactile virtual reality.

During many natural behaviors the relevant sensory stimuli and motor outputs are difficult to quantify. Furthermore, the high dimensionality of the space of possible stimuli and movements compounds the problem of experimental control. Head fixation facilitates stimulus control and movement tracking, and can be combined with techniques for recording and manipulating neural activity. However, hea...

Vibrotactile Whisker Frequency Discrimination in Head-Fixed Mice

A Novel Two-alternative Forced Choice Paradigm for Bilateral 3 Vibrotactile Whisker Frequency Discrimination in Head-Fixed Mice 4 and Rats 5 Johannes M. Mayrhofer, Vida Skreb, Wolfger von der Behrens, Simon Musall, Bruno Weber and 6 Florent Haiss* 7 8 Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland 9 10 Running title: bilateral frequency discrimination in hea...

Hippocampus-Dependent Goal Localization by Head-Fixed Mice in Virtual Reality

The demonstration of the ability of rodents to navigate in virtual reality (VR) has made it an important behavioral paradigm for studying spatially modulated neuronal activity in these animals. However, their behavior in such simulated environments remains poorly understood. Here, we show that encoding and retrieval of goal location memory in mice head-fixed in VR depends on the postsynaptic sc...

Virtual reality , ultrasound guided liver

Peripheral optogenetic stimulation induces whisker movement and sensory perception in head-fixed mice

We discovered that optical stimulation of the mystacial pad in Emx1-Cre;Ai27D transgenic mice induces whisker movements due to activation of ChR2 expressed in muscles controlling retraction and protraction. Using high-speed videography in anesthetized mice, we characterize the amplitude of whisker protractions evoked by varying the intensity, duration, and frequency of optogenetic stimulation. ...