ArticlePLoS computational biology2013
Whisker movements reveal spatial attention: a unified computational model of active sensing control in the rat.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed.
- Proximity in mice induced by an auditory-conditioned stimulus.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Whisking Behaviour Reveals Stronger Evidence of Habituation in Homozygous Reeler Mice Compared to Controls.Genes, brain, and behavior · 2026Article
- Vibrissal sensing in mammals in a changing world.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Review
- Affiliation in mice induced by an auditory-conditioned stimulus.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Can we study whisker movements to gain insights into the natural sensory behaviours of mammals?The Journal of physiology · 2025Review
- Two modes in the absolute velocity statistics in cautious walks of laboratory rodents.Biophysical journal · 2025Article
- Artificial intelligence meets brain theory (again).Biological cybernetics · 2025Review
- Inferring internal states across mice and monkeys using facial features.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- Ring Attractors as the Basis of a Biomimetic Navigation System.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Abnormal whisker movements in the 3xTg-AD mouse model of Alzheimer's disease.Genes, brain, and behavior · 2022Article
- Neural Coding of Food Is a Multisensory, Sensorimotor Function.Nutrients · 2021Review
- Multimodal Representation Learning for Place Recognition Using Deep Hebbian Predictive Coding.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2021Article
- Gradient of tactile properties in the rat whisker pad.PLoS biology · 2020Article
- Article
- Whisking Asymmetry Signals Motor Preparation and the Behavioral State of Mice.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2019Article
- The Sensorimotor Basis of Whisker-Guided Anteroposterior Object Localization in Head-Fixed Mice.Current biology : CB · 2019Article
- Heterogeneity of neuronal responses in the nucleus of the solitary tract suggests sensorimotor integration in the neural code for taste.Journal of neurophysiology · 2019Article
- Bilateral Discrimination of Tactile Patterns without Whisking in Freely Running Rats.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2017Article
- Radial Distance Estimation with Tapered Whisker Sensors.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Spatial attention is most often investigated in the visual modality through measurement of eye movements, with primates, including humans, a widely-studied model. Its study in laboratory rodents, such as mice and rats, requires different techniques, owing to the lack of a visual fovea and the particular ethological relevance of orienting movements of the snout and the whiskers in these animals. In recent years, several reliable relationships have been observed between environmental and behavioural variables and movements of the whiskers, but the function of these responses, as well as how they integrate, remains unclear. Here, we propose a unifying abstract model of whisker movement control that has as its key variable the region of space that is the animal's current focus of attention, and demonstrate, using computer-simulated behavioral experiments, that the model is consistent with a broad range of experimental observations. A core hypothesis is that the rat explicitly decodes the location in space of whisker contacts and that this representation is used to regulate whisker drive signals. This proposition stands in contrast to earlier proposals that the modulation of whisker movement during exploration is mediated primarily by reflex loops. We go on to argue that the superior colliculus is a candidate neural substrate for the siting of a head-centred map guiding whisker movement, in analogy to current models of visual attention. The proposed model has the potential to offer a more complete understanding of whisker control as well as to highlight the potential of the rodent and its whiskers as a tool for the study of mammalian attention.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.