Evidence for Functional Groupings of Vibrissae across the Rodent Mystacial Pad
Fig 12
Vibrissae of the Greek column exhibit long reaches to the side.
The vibrissae of column 2 (right) show convex mappings when yaw and pitch are near zero (θ = 0°, ϕ = 0°), while the vibrissae of the Greek column (left) are concave near this region. This means that the whiskers of the Greek column cannot touch the surface if the rat faces it symmetrically with a level head. The rat must either pitch its head up or down, or turn its head to the side. In all subplots black indicates a resting-contact, white indicates no contact, and the color scale indicates the value of θimpact. To permit visual comparison across subplots, the values of θimpact have been normalized between 0 (dark blue) and 1 (dark red).