作者
Ben Mitchinson, Robyn A Grant, Kendra Arkley, Vladan Rankov, Igor Perkon, Tony J Prescott
发表日期
2011/11/12
期刊
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
卷号
366
期号
1581
页码范围
3037-3048
出版商
The Royal Society
简介
In rats, the long facial whiskers (mystacial macrovibrissae) are repetitively and rapidly swept back and forth during exploration in a behaviour known as ‘whisking’. In this paper, we summarize previous evidence from rats, and present new data for rat, mouse and the marsupial grey short-tailed opossum (Monodelphis domestica) showing that whisking in all three species is actively controlled both with respect to movement of the animal's body and relative to environmental structure. Using automatic whisker tracking, and Fourier analysis, we first show that the whisking motion of the mystacial vibrissae, in the horizontal plane, can be approximated as a blend of two sinusoids at the fundamental frequency (mean 8.5, 11.3 and 7.3 Hz in rat, mouse and opossum, respectively) and its second harmonic. The oscillation at the second harmonic is particularly strong in mouse (around 22 Hz) consistent with previous reports of …
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B Mitchinson, RA Grant, K Arkley, V Rankov, I Perkon… - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B …, 2011