Natural Whisker-Guided Behavior by Head-Fixed Mice in Tactile Virtual Reality

“Detailed analyses of whisker movements in mice typically use camera acquisition rates of ; 500 fps (Sofroniew et al., 2014; Mayrhofer al., 2019).”

“The observed differences in the properties of VR and TM place cells may be the result of the absence of proximal visual cues and tactile cues (which are speculated to be more salient than visual cues) during VR tasks ( Knierim and Rao, 2003 ; Renaudineau et al., 2007 ; Sofroniew et al., 2014 ).”

“Headfixed mice use their whiskers [25,56] to identify differences in object texture [13], object locations [22,43], and aperture distances [35].”

“Active back and forth rhythmic movement of whiskers over objects (whisking) is used to produce a neural representation of a complex tactile scenes enabling rodents to locate objects (1-3), to perform object recognition (4), to guide their locomotion along walls (5, 6), and to navigate in their natural habitat of dark…”

“In rodents, for example, whisking—a tactile sensory behavior—emerges several milliseconds before locomotion and correlates with locomotor speed 1 .”

“, by head movements directed by attention 31 [4], whiskers scanning the immediate proximity [5], the nose sniffing aromas [6], or by deformation of 32 the ears [7].”

“A study by [11] studied whisker-guided locomotion by using movable walls on both sides of the animal to simulate tunnel walls.”

“…characteristic coordinated sequence of diagonal LH-RF and RH-LF strides observed corresponds to trotting, the natural gait that mice produce (37) to accommodate speeds faster than 20 cm/s. Individual strides of all limbs are also detected as periodic oscillations (28) in lateral acceleration (Fig.”

“31,32 40 However the field-of-view of most microscopes is still limited to imaging one local population (but see, Sofroniew et al., 41 Yu et al., 42 and Chen et al. 43 ), and population imaging does not yet permit the reliable recording of single action potentials at the millisecond temporal scale.”

“Experimental procedures were approved by the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (APA-FIS#11158-2017041316199 v8) in agreement with the European Directive 86/609/EEC and by the ethical committee of the Université Paris Cité.”

“Among these different sensing methods, contact sensing through whiskers plays a pivotal role for certain species, such as rodents and pin-nipeds, enabling obstacle detection and navigation, particularly under conditions where other sensory inputs are limited [1], [2], [3], [4].”

“Whisking during the CL straight run (t 0) is executed at 18±4Hz (mean ± s.d.) with an amplitude of just 20° ± 5 (mean ± s.d.) around a set point of 58° ± 5 (mean ± s.d.) that is typical for a “foveal” whisking generated during fast locomotion 14,20 .”

“…rhythmicity and improved the coupling between stepping and LFP beta Since locomotion in mice and humans occurs in the delta frequency range 1 , we calculated the spectral power of the treadmill speed, as treadmill speed fl uctuations closely track animals stepping cycles during running 8,60 .”

“Head-fixation training combined with modern electrophysiology and imaging techniques has provided a wealth of new knowledge on how the brain functions to support an assortment of behaviors [5–10].”

“…is also consistent with extensive evidence for active sensing in animals with mobile whiskers, including rats, mice and aquatic mammals (Arkley et al., 2014; Campagner et al., 2019; Grant et al., 2013; Mitchinson et al., 2007; O’Connor et al., 2010; Sofroniew et al., 2014; Towal & Hartmann, 2006).”

“Virtual reality setups have been developed to flexibly study neural activity during behavior (Aghajan et al., 2015; Dombeck et al., 2007, 2010; Go et al., 2021; Harvey et al., 2009; Hölscher et al., 2005; Keller et al., 2012; Minderer et al., 2016; Radvansky & Dombeck, 2018; Sofroniew et al., 2014).”

“In rodents, exploration of the environment is often linked to movement of the head and whiskers (Arkley et al., 2014; Towel and Hartmann, 2006; Hartmann et al., 2003; Sofroniew et al., 2014), with facial movements linked to activity observed in widespread areas of cortex (Churchland et al.”

“Bending moment can permit wall following (Sofroniew et al., 2014) and, if integrated across whiskers, can in principle be used both to infer object shape (Solomon and Hartmann, 2006) and to map the spatial structure of the environment (Fox et al.”

“In particular, mice have long served as model organisms for non-primate visual systems [ 12, 13 ], and advances in two-photon calcium imaging with craniotomy now allow researchers to record activity from individual neurons, providing a level of detail not accessible with population-level measures […”

“In addition, whisker behaviour can consist of non-periodic movements that precede head and body movements (Dominiak et al., 2019; Sofroniew, Cohen, Lee, & Svoboda, 2014; Towal & Hartmann, 2006).”

“Recently, a walltracking task in virtual environments has been carried out (Sofroniew et al. 2014), allowing a precise control of the stimulus radial distance freely-running mice.”

“Set of audio, video, and share data interactive multimedia communication is a kind of distributed real-time multimedia communication application, it not only with real-time audio and video that is nearly continuous media, but also make full use of other multimedia information [1-2].”

“VR has been used for decades to study the neural basis of behavior and has been adapted to several animal models and different sensory modalities (Dombeck and Reiser (2012), Sofroniew et al. (2014)).”