Characterizing the functional significance of the neonatal rat vibrissae prior to the onset of whisking.

Discriminative whisking in the head-fixed rat: optoelectronic monitoring during tactile detection and discrimination tasks.

We compared whisking movement patterns during acquisition of tactile detection and object discrimination under conditions in which (a) head movements are excluded and (b) exposure to tactile discriminanda is confined to the large, moveable vibrissae (macrovibrissae). We used optoelectronic instrumentation to track the movements of an individual whisker with high spatio-temporal resolution and a...

Rhythmic whisking by rat: retraction as well as protraction of the vibrissae is under active muscular control.

The rhythmic motor activity of the vibrissae that rodents use for the tactile localization of objects provides a model system for understanding patterned motor activity in mammals. The muscles that drive this whisking are only partially fixed relative to bony attachments and thus shift their position along with the movement. As a means to characterize the pattern of muscular dynamics during dif...

Whisking with Robots From Rat Vibrissae to Biomimetic Technology for Active Touch

Anticipatory activity of motor cortex in relation to rhythmic whisking.

Rats characteristically generate stereotyped exploratory (5-12 Hz) whisker movements, which can also be adaptively modulated. Here we tested the hypothesis that the vibrissal representation in motor cortex (vMCx) initiates and modulates whisking by acting on a subcortical whisking central pattern generator (CPG). We recorded local field potentials (LFPs) in vMCx of behaving Sprague-Dawley rats ...

One whisker whisking: unit recording during conditioned whisking in rats.

Understanding of the functional neurobiology of the rodent whisker system would be advanced by neurobehavioral studies in awake, behaving animals that combine unit recording from structures at various levels of the system with quantitative characterization of the kinematics and temporal organization of whisking. Such studies require the solution of a number of methodological problems. These inc...