The development of whisker control in rats in relation to locomotion

Grant, Robyn A.; Mitchinson, Ben; Prescott, Tony J.

doi:10.1002/dev.20591

Cited by 79 publications

(81 citation statements)

References 39 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Periodic motion of the whiskers does not appear to be critical in the final stages of prey capture. It is notable that whisker movement emerges alongside forward ambulation [27]. This reinforces the view that whisking is fundamentally a The left-hand grid shows results for the side nearest (ipsilateral) to the object, the right-hand grid shows movement on the opposite (contralateral) side.…”

Section: Discussion (A) Describing the Movement Of Vibrissal Arrayssupporting

confidence: 74%

“…CIA appears to function so as to prevent ipsilateral whiskers from bending hard against the contacted object, while increasing the number of contacts made with that object by whiskers on the contralateral side. CIA is observed in juvenile rats some time after the onset of bilateral whisking (typically delayed by a few days), suggesting that this form of control may be experience-dependent or rely on relatively late-maturing brain pathways [27].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Active vibrissal sensing in rodents and marsupials

Mitchinson

Grant

Arkley

et al. 2011

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

Self Cite

111

146

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In rats, the long facial whiskers (mystacial macrovibrissae) are repetitively and rapidly swept back and forth during exploration in a behaviour known as 'whisking'. In this paper, we summarize previous evidence from rats, and present new data for rat, mouse and the marsupial grey short-tailed opossum (Monodelphis domestica) showing that whisking in all three species is actively controlled both with respect to movement of the animal's body and relative to environmental structure. Using automatic whisker tracking, and Fourier analysis, we first show that the whisking motion of the mystacial vibrissae, in the horizontal plane, can be approximated as a blend of two sinusoids at the fundamental frequency (mean 8.5, 11.3 and 7.3 Hz in rat, mouse and opossum, respectively) and its second harmonic. The oscillation at the second harmonic is particularly strong in mouse (around 22 Hz) consistent with previous reports of fast whisking in that species. In all three species, we found evidence of asymmetric whisking during head turning and following unilateral object contacts consistent with active control of whisker movement. We propose that the presence of active vibrissal touch in both rodents and marsupials suggests that this behavioural capacity emerged at an early stage in the evolution of therian mammals.

show abstract

Section: Discussion (A) Describing the Movement Of Vibrissal Arrayssupporting

confidence: 74%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Active vibrissal sensing in rodents and marsupials

Mitchinson

Grant

Arkley

et al. 2011

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

Self Cite

111

146

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…An important question that we are currently investigating through behavioural studies is whether active touch control is experience-dependent, that is, do animals adapt their patterns of whisking motor control to improve sensory performance either during development, or while learning a task? Preliminary evidence suggests a positive answer to both of these questions [12,46].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Biomimetic vibrissal sensing for robots

Pearson

Mitchinson

Sullivan

et al. 2011

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Active vibrissal touch can be used to replace or to supplement sensory systems such as computer vision and, therefore, improve the sensory capacity of mobile robots. This paper describes how arrays of whisker-like touch sensors have been incorporated onto mobile robot platforms taking inspiration from biology for their morphology and control. There were two motivations for this work: first, to build a physical platform on which to model, and therefore test, recent neuroethological hypotheses about vibrissal touch; second, to exploit the control strategies and morphology observed in the biological analogue to maximize the quality and quantity of tactile sensory information derived from the artificial whisker array. We describe the design of a new whiskered robot, Shrewbot, endowed with a biomimetic array of individually controlled whiskers and a neuroethologically inspired whisking pattern generation mechanism. We then present results showing how the morphology of the whisker array shapes the sensory surface surrounding the robot's head, and demonstrate the impact of active touch control on the sensory information that can be acquired by the robot. We show that adopting bio-inspired, low latency motor control of the rhythmic motion of the whiskers in response to contact-induced stimuli usefully constrains the sensory range, while also maximizing the number of whisker contacts. The robot experiments also demonstrate that the sensory consequences of active touch control can be usefully investigated in biomimetic robots.

show abstract

“…Two methods are provided for calculating frequency: Autocorrelogram [31] and Discrete Fourier Transforms [32] (Fig. 2).…”

Section: Whisking Frequencymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rats use their whiskers as collision detectors when running, by ceasing whisking and positioning their whiskers far out in front of them [34,35]. Due to the association with whisking and locomotion, locomotion always needs to be controlled for, to make sure observed differences in whisking are not simply caused by changes in locomotor activity [7].…”

Section: Locomotion Velocity/distance Travelledmentioning

confidence: 99%