Rodents, such as rats and mice, are strongly tactile animals who explore the environment with their long mobile facial whiskers, or macrovibrissae, and orient to explore objects further with their shorter, more densely packed, microvibrissae. Although whisker motion (whisking) has been extensively studied, less is known about how rodents orient their vibrissal system to investigate unexpected s...

Expectation of reward motivates our behaviors and influences our decisions. Indeed, neuronal activity in many brain areas is modulated by expected reward. However, it is still unclear where and how the reward-dependent modulation of neuronal activity occurs and how the reward-modulated signal is transformed into motor outputs. Recent studies suggest an important role of the basal ganglia. Senso...

Parts orienting, the process of bringing parts in initially unknown orientations to a goal orientation, is an important aspect of automated assembly. The most common industrial orienting systems are vibratory bowl feeders, which use the shape and mass properties of parts to orient them. Bowl feeders rely on a sequence of mechanical operations and typically do not use sensors. In this paper, we ...

Insects maintain a constant bearing across a wide range of spatial scales. Monarch butterflies and locusts traverse continents [1, 2], and foraging bees and ants travel hundreds of meters to return to their nests [1, 3, 4], whereas many other insects fly straight for only a few centimeters before changing direction. Despite this variation in spatial scale, the brain region thought to underlie l...

This paper provides a high level overview of a game called ORIENT which aims at cultural and emotional learning by engaging adolescents in a role-play with virtual characters in a virtual world. The paper focuses on defining and explaining the learning objectives, and gives an overview of how we intend to achieve these objectives using narrative concepts, affective characters, and innovative te...