Whisker Movements Reveal Spatial Attention: A Unified Computational Model of Active Sensing Control in the Rat
Figure 1
(Top) Three still frames from a top-down video recording of a rat encountering and orienting to the corner of a square object with vertical walls (data from [20]). Each successive frame is at approximately the time of maximum protraction of three consecutive ‘whisks’ (t = 0 ms, 120 ms, 230 ms)—the first is that immediately following the rat's first contact with the object. Two behavioural responses can be seen in the subsequent frames: (i) the whiskers are positioned asymmetrically around the snout and (ii) the tip of the snout is brought to the point of contact with the object. The whole video (covering the same time range as the plot) is available as Video S1. (Bottom) Average bilateral protraction angle of the whiskers recovered from the same video over a time period covering the encounter (left/right is black/grey; vertical scale bar has length 30°). Main feature of these signals until contact at t = 0 ms is periodic protraction and retraction known as ‘whisking’. The times of the three still frames are marked as dots on the trace from the left hand whiskers (see main text).