Abstract
BackgroundActive sensing is crucial for navigation. It is characterized by self-generated motor action controlling the accessibility and processing of sensory information. In rodents, active sensing is commonly studied in the whisker system. As rats and mice modulate their whisking contextually, they employ frequency and amplitude modulation. Understanding the development, mechanisms, and plasticity of adaptive motor control will require precise behavioral measurements of whisker position.FindingsAdvances in high-speed videography and analytical methods now permit collection and systematic analysis of large datasets. Here, we provide 6,642 videos as freely moving juvenile (third to fourth postnatal week) and adult rodents explore a stationary object on the gap-crossing task. The dataset includes sensory exploration with single- or multi-whiskers in wild-type animals, serotonin transporter knockout rats, rats received pharmacological intervention targeting serotonergic signaling. The dataset includes varying background illumination conditions and signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), ranging from homogenous/high contrast to non-homogenous/low contrast. A subset of videos has been whisker and nose tracked and are provided as reference for image processing algorithms.ConclusionsThe recorded behavioral data can be directly used to study development of sensorimotor computation, top-down mechanisms that control sensory navigation and whisker position, and cross-species comparison of active sensing. It could also help to address contextual modulation of active sensing during touch-induced whisking in head-fixed vs freely behaving animals. Finally, it provides the necessary data for machine learning approaches for automated analysis of sensory and motion parameters across a wide variety of signal-to-noise ratios with accompanying human observer-determined ground-truth.
Highlights
Active sensing is crucial for navigation
It is characterized by self-generated motor action controlling the accessibility and processing of sensory information
Active sensing is commonly studied in the whisker system
Summary
Mystacial vibrissae, are sensory hairs that are densely organized as a grid on the snout. The dataset includes independent variables of species (rat vs mouse), developmental age (juvenile vs adult, i.e., 3–5 postnatal weeks and >6 weeks, respectively), sensory deprivation (single vs multi-whisker,) and genetic background (i.e., serotonin transporter [SERT] knock-down vs control]; see below). The training sessions (N = 10/rat; N = 30/mouse) lasted 30 minutes (or 30 successful trials) in which the gap distance (see below) was randomly drawn from a Gaussian distribution. With increasing number of sessions, the mean of the distribution was increased and variance reduced, adapting each animal’s individual learning curve to ensure animals preferentially use their whiskers for target localization in the majority of the trials. Catch trials, where the target platform is positioned just outside of the animal’s reach, were randomly introduced (∼15% of successful trials) to ensure that the task execution required tactile exploration and was not a result of expectation and sensorimotor habit formation
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