title: Pre-neuronal morphological processing of object location by individual whiskers.
abstract: In the vibrissal system, touch information is conveyed by a receptorless whisker hair to follicle mechanoreceptors, which then provide input to the brain. We examined whether any processing, that is, meaningful transformation, occurs in the whisker itself. Using high-speed videography and tracking the movements of whiskers in anesthetized and behaving rats, we found that whisker-related morphological phase planes, based on angular and curvature variables, can represent the coordinates of object position after contact in a reliable manner, consistent with theoretical predictions. By tracking exposed follicles, we found that the follicle-whisker junction is rigid, which enables direct readout of whisker morphological coding by mechanoreceptors. Finally, we found that our behaving rats pushed their whiskers against objects during localization in a way that induced meaningful morphological coding and, in parallel, improved their localization performance, which suggests a role for pre-neuronal morphological computation in active vibrissal touch.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.
authors.forename: Knarik
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Bagdasarian
authors.forename: Marcin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Szwed
authors.forename: Per Magne
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Knutsen
authors.forename: Dudi
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Deutsch
authors.forename: Dori
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Derdikman
authors.forename: Maciej
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pietr
authors.forename: Erez
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Simony
authors.forename: Ehud
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Ahissar
mesh_terms: D000344:Afferent Pathways / Q000502:physiology*; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D000777:Anesthetics / Q000494:pharmacology; D000818:Animals; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D001931:Brain Mapping; D018859:Hair Follicle / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D008465:Mechanoreceptors / Q000502:physiology*; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology*; D010812:Physical Stimulation; D051381:Rats; D017208:Rats, Wistar; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013997:Time Factors; D014738:Vibrissae / Q000294:innervation*; D014741:Video Recording; D014851:Wakefulness
chemical_list: D000777:Anesthetics
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