An open-source high-speed infrared videography database to study the principles of active sensing in freely navigating rodents

Abstract

BackgroundActive sensing is crucial for navigation. It is characterized by self-generated motor action controlling the accessibility and processing of sensory information. In rodents, active sensing is commonly studied in the whisker system. As rats and mice modulate their whisking contextually, they employ frequency and amplitude modulation. Understanding the development, mechanisms, and plasticity of adaptive motor control will require precise behavioral measurements of whisker position.FindingsAdvances in high-speed videography and analytical methods now permit collection and systematic analysis of large datasets. Here, we provide 6,642 videos as freely moving juvenile (third to fourth postnatal week) and adult rodents explore a stationary object on the gap-crossing task. The dataset includes sensory exploration with single- or multi-whiskers in wild-type animals, serotonin transporter knockout rats, rats received pharmacological intervention targeting serotonergic signaling. The dataset includes varying background illumination conditions and signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), ranging from homogenous/high contrast to non-homogenous/low contrast. A subset of videos has been whisker and nose tracked and are provided as reference for image processing algorithms.ConclusionsThe recorded behavioral data can be directly used to study development of sensorimotor computation, top-down mechanisms that control sensory navigation and whisker position, and cross-species comparison of active sensing. It could also help to address contextual modulation of active sensing during touch-induced whisking in head-fixed vs freely behaving animals. Finally, it provides the necessary data for machine learning approaches for automated analysis of sensory and motion parameters across a wide variety of signal-to-noise ratios with accompanying human observer-determined ground-truth.

Prominent Inhibitory Projections Guide Sensorimotor Computation: An Invertebrate Perspective

“…This time derivative of the incoming sensory input, often in relation to the motor state of the animal, is an important control signal that shapes the motor output of the organism. [38][39][40] In C. elegans, the behavior of the nematode in the absence of food will change the navigational state from "searching" to "dispersal," each of which requires a distinct set of sensory neurons. Thus, their motor control strategy is tightly coupled to the sensory information available in their immediate environment, rather than being based on planned (often goal-directed) actions, which require motor planning in the context of landmarks and world-centric coordinates.…”

Serotonergic development of active sensing

“…All experimental procedures have been performed in accordance with the Dutch and European laws concerning animal welfare after the institutional ethical committee approval. The raw data have been previously made publically available as a part of the tactile navigation database (Azarfar et al, 2018b).…”

“…It is freely distributed under a Creative Commons CC-BY license which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction of the data in any medium provided that the database (Azarfar et al, 2018b) is properly cited.…”

“…After the completion of a trial, gap-distance was randomly selected from a normal distribution where the distribution mean increased and the variance was reduced with the increasing number of training sessions completed on the task (Miceli et al, 2017;Azarfar et al, 2018b).…”

“…Because the barrel cortex and the primary motor cortex have reciprocal monosynaptic communication (Kleinfeld et al, 1999;Bosman et al, 2011), altered serotonergic signaling could potentially dysregulate whisker positional control during sensory navigation. Here we addressed this question using a publically available high-speed videography database of rats performing a tactile object localization task (Azarfar et al, 2018b). By quantitatively analyzing the motor control dynamics of whisker and body position, we show that sustained alterations of serotonergic signaling in SERT-/-rats, or the transient inactivation of the serotonin transporter during early postnatal development impairs emergence of adaptive motor control of whiskers, but not the body positional control in adulthood.…”