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Functional Principles of Whisker-Mediated Touch Perception

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Sensorimotor Integration in the Whisker System

Abstract

In the progression of events wherein the rodent whisker sensory system constructs a percept of the world around the animal, neurons exercise distinct functional roles; here we review recent progress in our understanding of the principles for response organization in the system. The whisker’s mechanical properties and anchoring to the follicle shape the forces transmitted to specialized receptors. The sensory and motor systems are intimately interconnected, giving rise to two forms of whisker-mediated sensation: generative and receptive. The sensory pathway exemplifies fundamental concepts in computation and coding: hierarchical feature selectivity, sparseness, adaptive representations, and population coding. The central processing of signals can be considered a sequence of filters. At the level of cortex, neurons represent object features by a coordinated population code which encompasses cells with heterogeneous properties.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Stuart Ingham for help with the artwork in Fig. 8.1 and to Marco Gigante for the artwork in Fig. 8.5c. We thank Michael Bale for comments on an earlier version. Funding was from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness grant BFU2011-23049 (co-funded by the European Fund for Regional Development); the Valencia Regional Government grant PROMETEO/2011/086; the Human Frontier Science Program grant Neuroscience of Knowledge (RG0015/2013); the European Research Council Advanced grant CONCEPT (294498); the European Union FET grant CORONET (269459); the Italian Ministry for Universities and Research grant HANDBOT.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QG, United Kingdom

    Miguel Maravall

  2. Tactile Perception and Learning Lab, International School for Advanced Studies-SISSA, Via Bonomea 265, 34136, Trieste, Italy

    Mathew E. Diamond

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  1. Miguel Maravall
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Correspondence to Miguel Maravall or Mathew E. Diamond .

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  1. Department of Systems Neuroscience, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

    Patrik Krieger

  2. Institute of Neuroscience, Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Munich, Germany

    Alexander Groh

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Maravall, M., Diamond, M. (2015). Functional Principles of Whisker-Mediated Touch Perception. In: Krieger, P., Groh, A. (eds) Sensorimotor Integration in the Whisker System. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2975-7_8

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