Whisker Wonders
Synopsis
When we touch something, how do sensations from our hands get translated into perceptions by our brains? Meet two scientists who are trying to answer that question with a curious tool: rat whiskers. Just like hands are to humans, whiskers are rats’ primary sensors of touch. Analyzing how whisker sensations get processed by rats’ brains is providing a powerful model that’s helping reveal the mysteries of our own sense of touch.
This video is based on:
The Morphology of the Rat Vibrissal Array: A Model for Quantifying Spatiotemporal Patterns of Whisker-Object Contact, a paper published by Mitra Hartmann and colleagues in the online journal PLoS Computational Biology.
Psychometric Curve and Behavioral Strategies for Whisker-Based Texture Discrimination in Rats, a paper published by Daniel Feldman and colleagues in the online journal PLoS ONE.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
News
First five Science Bytes pilot episodes completed
August 17, 2012 — Kikim Media has completed production of five short videos telling stories from the frontiers of science.