Optoelectronic monitoring of discriminative whisking in the head fixed rat.
Item
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Title
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Optoelectronic monitoring of discriminative whisking in the head fixed rat.
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Identifier
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AAI9986334
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identifier
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9986334
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Creator
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Harvey, Michael Allen.
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Contributor
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Adviser: H. Phillip Zeigler
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Date
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2000
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Behavioral
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Abstract
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The rodent vibrissae function as sensorimotor elements in an "active touch" system. Whisking movements generate patterns of somatosensory input which are used to guide exploratory and discriminative behaviors, including, movements of the vibrissae themselves. When asked to use their vibrissae to make sensory discriminations the rat's performance is correlated with systematic modulation of whisking movement parameters to meet the functional requirements of the discriminative task (Carvell & Simons, '95). The vibrissae are represented at cortical levels by discrete neuronal aggregates ("barrels"), whose spatial organization replicates the pattern of individual whiskers on the snout. Ablation of the cortical "barrel field" has no effect upon tactile detection or discrimination tasks involving passive touch, but disrupts performance on active touch tasks such as gap detection, (Hutson and Masterton, '86), and texture discrimination, Rubles, et al, '92). Using novel methods we have examined the development of task specific patterns of whisking during the acquisition of tactile detections and discriminations, as well as the effect of unilateral barrel field ablation upon the unconditioned ("spontaneous") patterns of vibrissa movement in three rats. Good performance on the two tactile tasks was correlated with the development of whisking strategies that were task specific, and comparable to what has been previously described in nonhead fixed animals. Patterns of "spontaneous" whisker movements were altered in all three rats in all animals sustaining "barrel field" ablations suggesting that the tactile performance deficits previously described in animals sustaining these types of lesions may have been mediated by effects upon the sensorimotor control of vibrissa movement patterns. Our methods provide important improvements over those previously used to examine whisking behavior. Head fixation allows us to restrict stimulus access to only the large mystacial vibrissae on one side of the animals face, and controls for movements not generated by the whiskers, i.e. head neck and limbs. Optoelectronic monitoring provides a record of whisking movements that have a higher spatio-temporal resolution than what is available to common video graphic methods, and greatly simplifies analysis.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
