Biometric analyses of vibrissal tactile discrimination in the rat
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TLDR
The capacity of the rodent whisker system to distinguish a smooth surface from a rough one is comparable to that of primates using their fingertips and suggest common strategies for active touch in the mammalian somatomotor system.Abstract:
Blindfolded rats were trained to stretch across a gap to palpate rough or smooth surfaces with their mystacial vibrissae. Animals learned to discriminate reliably a smooth surface from a rough surface having shallow (approximately 30 microns) grooves spaced at 90 microns intervals. Field-by-field video analyses confirmed that rats used only their vibrissae to contact the discriminanda. The whiskers swept across the surfaces at 696 degrees/sec during forward movements and 1106 degrees/sec for retracting movements. Mean amplitudes, which were 32 degrees, were considerably smaller than the total arc through which whiskers can move. Rats maintained whisker contact with discriminanda for several hundreds of msec, during which time the animals repetitively swept their vibrissae across the surface at a dominant frequency of 8 Hz. The range extended from 1 to 20 Hz, and the frequencies utilized varied within and among subjects. Whiskers contacted the discriminanda along the hair shaft, not at the whisker tips. The hair shafts were bent continually but to varying degrees as an animal palpated the surface, and more than one of the large caudal whiskers were almost always in contact with it. Thus, whiskers are not used independently as rigid levers. Results indicate that the capacity of the rodent whisker system to distinguish a smooth surface from a rough one is comparable to that of primates using their fingertips and suggest common strategies for active touch in the mammalian somatomotor system.read more
Citations
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In vivo dendritic calcium dynamics in neocortical pyramidal neurons
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The Functional Organization of the Barrel Cortex
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References
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TL;DR: The author describes how his methods of investigation with celloidin embedded material prepared with the Golgi method and Nissl staining revealed for the first time the “barrel fields” of the mouse cerebral cortex that are activated by stimulation of the facial vibrissae (whiskers).
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TL;DR: The various lines of evidence indicate that sniffing is a fixed and stable response pattern that is relatively independent of age and of long or short term experiential factors.
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Response properties of vibrissa units in rat SI somatosensory neocortex
TL;DR: Glass microelectrodes were used to record extracellular responses from 308 SI cortical neurons to deflections of the contralateral vibrissae in 21 unanesthetized, paralyzed rats, finding that FSs responded more reliably and over a broader range of frequencies than did RSUs, particularly in layer IV.
Journal ArticleDOI
Microelectrode delineation of fine grain somatotopic organization of (SmI) cerebral neocortex in albino rat.
TL;DR: Microelectrode recording, systematic mapping, and cytoarchitectural techniques were combined in the present study to determine fine details in the patterns of somatic sensory projections from mystacial vibrissae, and other body regions, to SmI of the rat.