Whisker movements reveal spatial attention: a unified computational model of active sensing control in the rat.

ABSTRACT: Spatial attention is most often investigated in the visual modality through measurement of eye movements, with primates, including humans, a widely-studied model. Its study in laboratory rodents, such as mice and rats, requires different techniques, owing to the lack of a visual fovea and the particular ethological relevance of orienting movements of the snout and the whiskers in these animals. In recent years, several reliable relationships have been observed between environmental and behavioural variables and movements of the whiskers, but the function of these responses, as well as how they integrate, remains unclear. Here, we propose a unifying abstract model of whisker movement control that has as its key variable the region of space that is the animal's current focus of attention, an

SUBMITTER: Mitchinson B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3784505 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature