Single cortical neurons in the mammalian brain receive signals arising from multiple sensory input channels. Dendritic integration of these afferent signals is critical in determining the amplitude and time course of the neurons' output signals. As of yet, little is known about the spatial and temporal organization of converging sensory inputs. Here, we combined in vivo two-photon imaging with ...

We investigated the natural resonance properties and damping characteristics of rat macrovibrissae (whiskers). Isolated whiskers rigidly fixed at the base showed first-mode resonance peaks between 27 and 260 Hz, principally depending on whisker length. These experimentally measured resonant frequencies were matched using a theoretical model of the whisker as a conical cantilever beam, with Youn...

We have developed software for fully automated tracking of vibrissae (whiskers) in high-speed videos (>500 Hz) of head-fixed, behaving rodents trimmed to a single row of whiskers. Performance was assessed against a manually curated dataset consisting of 1.32 million video frames comprising 4.5 million whisker traces. The current implementation detects whiskers with a recall of 99.998% and ident...

Rodents use their whiskers (vibrissae) for tactile perception. Our artificial whiskers follow the basic design of the follicle of rodent vibrissae. In experiments with the artificial whiskers, we have explored tactile perception based on active whisking, and found the deflection amplitude or velocity provides the localization information of a target obeject. Based on this localization approach,...

The failure mechanism was determined to be tin whiskers emanating from the tin plating on the internal pins. The high conductivity, pure tin crystalline whiskers bridged the 10-mil spark gap to cause the test failures. The fusing current of the whiskers was in the range of the source current of the test equipment. This caused inconsistencies during problem identification and verification at the...