ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2017
Bilateral Discrimination of Tactile Patterns without Whisking in Freely Running Rats.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Diverse Neuronal Activity in Barrel Cortex During Self-Grooming and Whisking in Mice.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Article
- A latent pool of neurons silenced by sensory-evoked inhibition can be recruited to enhance perception.Neuron · 2024Article
- Reliability and stability of tactile perception in the whisker somatosensory system.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- Global and local neuronal coding of tactile information in the barrel cortex.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Imaging the brain in action: a motorized optical rotary joint for wide field fibroscopy in freely moving animals.Neurophotonics · 2023Article
- Naturalistic neuroscience and virtual reality.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2022Review
- Implanting and Recycling Neuropixels Probes for Recordings in Freely Moving Mice.Bio-protocol · 2020Article
- Sensory Island Task (SIT): A New Behavioral Paradigm to Study Sensory Perception and Neural Processing in Freely Moving Animals.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2020Article
- Whisking Asymmetry Signals Motor Preparation and the Behavioral State of Mice.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2019Article
- Chronically implanted Neuropixels probes enable high-yield recordings in freely moving mice.eLife · 2019Article
- Sensory coding is impaired in rat absence epilepsy.The Journal of physiology · 2019Article
- Decision-making behaviors: weighing ethology, complexity, and sensorimotor compatibility.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2018Review
- A Novel Method for Training Mice in Visuo-Tactile 3-D Object Discrimination and Recognition.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A majority of whisker discrimination tasks in rodents are performed on head-fixed animals to facilitate tracking or control of the sensory inputs. However, head fixation critically restrains the behavior and thus the incoming stimuli compared with those occurring in natural conditions. In this study, we investigated whether freely behaving rats can discriminate fine tactile patterns while running, in particular when stimuli are presented simultaneously on both sides of the snout. We developed a two-alternative forced-choice task in an automated modified T-maze. Stimuli were either a surface with no bars (smooth) or with vertical bars spaced irregularly or regularly. While running at full speed, rats encountered simultaneously the two discriminanda placed on the two sides of the central aisle. Rats learned to recognize regular bars versus a smooth surface in 8 weeks. They solved the task while running at an average speed of 1 m/s, so that the contact with the stimulus lasted <1 typical whisking cycle, precluding the use of active whisking. Whisker-tracking analysis revealed an asymmetry in the position of the whiskers: they oriented toward the rewarded stimulus during successful trials as early as 60 ms after the first possible contact. We showed that the whiskers and activity in the primary somatosensory cortex are involved during the discrimination process. Finally, we identified irregular patterns of bars that the rats can discriminate from the regular one. This novel task shows that freely moving rodents can make simultaneous bilateral tactile discrimination without whisking.
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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.