Animals actively regulate the position and movement of their sensory systems to boost the quality and quantity of the sensory information they obtain. The rat vibrissal system is recognized to be an important model system in which to investigate such "active sensing" capabilities. The current study used high-speed video analysis to investigate whisker movements in untrained, freely moving rats ...

A large number of Sn whiskers have been found on the Pb-free solder finish on leadframes used in consumer electronic products. Some of the whiskers on eutectic SnCu finishes are long enough to short the neighboring legs of the leadframe. Tin whisker growth is known to be a stress relief phenomenon. We have performed synchrotron radiation X-ray micro-diffraction analysis to measure the local str...

During development, activity in the somatosensory cortex is characterized by intermittent oscillatory bursts at gamma (early gamma-oscillations, EGOs) and alpha-beta (spindle-bursts, SBs) frequencies. Here, we explored the topography of EGOs and SBs in the neighbor barrels of the whisker-related barrel cortex of neonatal rats (P4-7) during responses evoked by simultaneous activation of multiple...

Each cerebral hemisphere processes sensory input from both sides of the body, but the impact of this convergence on shaping and modifying receptive field properties remains controversial. Here we investigated the effect of chronic deprivation of ipsilateral sensory whiskers on receptive field plasticity in primary somatosensory cortex. In the absence of ipsilateral whiskers, cortical receptive ...

Mammalian whiskers present an important class of tactile sensors that complement the functionalities of skin for detecting wind with high sensitivity and navigation around local obstacles. Here, we report electronic whiskers based on highly tunable composite films of carbon nanotubes and silver nanoparticles that are patterned on high-aspect-ratio elastic fibers. The nanotubes form a conductive...

Our sense of touch provides information about nearby objects that can affect us in an immediate way. Texture, a central component of touch, is sensed quickly, even before an object is explored to measure its size, shape, or identity. To learn how contact with a surface produces a sensation of texture, many laboratories have examined the whisker system of rodents. Touch sensed through the whiske...

We deal with a perturbation of a hyperbolic integrable Hamiltonian system with n+ 1 degrees of freedom. The integrable system is assumed to have n-dimensional hyperbolic invariant tori with coincident whiskers (separatrices). Following Eliasson, we use a geometric approach closely related to the Lagrangian properties of the whiskers, to show that the splitting distance between the perturbed sta...

The capacity of adult barrel cortex to show experience-dependent plasticity after early restricted neonatal sensory deprivation was analyzed in barrel field cortex neurons. Selective sensory deprivation was induced by trimming two whiskers from postnatal day 0 (P0) to P21, namely, the principal D2 whisker plus one adjacent surround whisker (D3). At maturity (P90), responses of supragranular (la...

The rat vibrissal system is an important model for the study of somatosensation, but the small size and rapid speed of the vibrissae have precluded measuring precise vibrissal-object contact sequences during behavior. We used a laser light sheet to quantify, with 1 ms resolution, the spatiotemporal structure of whisker-surface contact as five naïve rats freely explored a flat, vertical glass wa...