The effects of sensory deprivation on excitatory and inhibitory activity in the primary somatosensory cortex were studied in the adult rat. Excitatory and inhibitory transmission generated by whisker stimulation, and neuronal responsiveness to iontophoretically applied excitatory amino acids were recorded. Whisker input deprivation, through whisker trimming for a median of 24 days, resulted in ...

Mice homozygous for the barrelless (brl) mutation, mapped here to chromosome 11, lack barrel-shaped arrays of cell clusters termed "barrels" in the primary somatosensory cortex. Deoxyglucose uptake demonstrated that the topology of the cortical whisker representation is nevertheless preserved. Anterograde tracers revealed a lack of spatial segregation of thalamic afferents into individual barre...

This paper describes the progress of a project to locate, recognize and manipulate objects using information from whisker sensors. Object surface information is gathered by measuring the angle of deflection of a rigid whisker as it slides over the object surface. In order to successfully reconstruct the surface shape of an object, the whisker tip has to be in contact with the object. Ambiguous ...

Whisker hair follicles are sensory organs that sense touch and perform tactile discrimination in animals, and they are sites where sensory impulses are initiated when whisker hairs touch an object. The sensory signals are then conveyed by whisker afferent fibers to the brain for sensory perception. Electrophysiological property and chemical sensitivity of whisker afferent fibers, important fact...

Whisker movements are used by rodents to touch objects in order to extract spatial and textural tactile information about their immediate surroundings. To understand the mechanisms of such active sensorimotor processing it is important to investigate whisker motor control. The activity of neurons in the neocortex affects whisker movements, but many aspects of the organization of cortical whiske...

We discovered that optical stimulation of the mystacial pad in Emx1-Cre;Ai27D transgenic mice induces whisker movements due to activation of ChR2 expressed in muscles controlling retraction and protraction. Using high-speed videography in anesthetized mice, we characterize the amplitude of whisker protractions evoked by varying the intensity, duration, and frequency of optogenetic stimulation. ...

Using their whiskers, rats have tactile capacities rivaling those of the human with our fingertips. We have carried out experiments to explore how neurons encode touch signals to build up a central representation. Touch signals begin with the receptors in the follicle of each whisker and can be traced to a columnar module in somatosensory cortex that is connected with the same whisker: the well...

Using their whiskers, rats have tactile capacities rivaling those of the human with our fingertips. We have carried out experiments to explore how neurons encode touch signals to build up a central representation. Touch signals begin with the receptors in the follicle of each whisker and can be traced to a columnar module in somatosensory cortex that is connected with the same whisker: the well...

The generation of perceptual experiences requires the integration of complex spatiotemporal patterns of sensory input. The rodent whisker system is a useful model for understanding the cellular mechanisms of sensory integration, which often include the operation of local circuits distributed throughout the brain. An example is cross-whisker suppression, where the neuronal response to whisker de...

In the barrel cortex, several features of single-whisker stimuli are organized in functional maps. The barrel cortex also encodes spatio-temporal correlation patterns of multi-whisker inputs, but so far the cortical mapping of neurons tuned to such input statistics is unknown. Here we report that layer 2/3 of the rat barrel cortex contains an additional functional map based on neuronal tuning t...