@article {53,
	title = {A fluorescent dye method suitable for visualization of one or more rat whiskers},
	journal = {Bio-protocol},
	volume = {8},
	year = {2018},
	chapter = {e2749},
	abstract = {<p align="justify">Visualization and tracking of the facial whiskers is critical to many studies of rodent behavior. High-speed videography is the most robust methodology for characterizing whisker kinematics, but whisker visualization is challenging due to the low contrast of the whisker against its background. Recently, we showed that fluorescent dye(s) can be applied to enhance visualization and tracking of whisker(s) (Rigosa et al., 2017), and this protocol provides additional details on the technique.\&nbsp;</p>},
	keywords = {barrel cortex, Dye, Fluorescence, Tactile perception, Tracking, Whisker},
	doi = {10.21769/BioProtoc.2749},
	author = {Jacopo Rigosa and Alessandro Lucantonio and Giovanni Noselli and Arash Fassihi and Fabrizio Manzino and Francesca Pulecchi and Mathew E Diamond}
}
@article {32,
	title = {Behavioral study of whisker-mediated vibration sensation in rats},
	journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA},
	volume = {109},
	year = {2012},
	pages = {971{\textendash}976},
	abstract = {<p align="justify">Rats use their vibrissal sensory system to collect information about the nearby environment. They can accurately and rapidly identify object location, shape, and surface texture. Which features of whisker motion does the sensory system extract to construct sensations? We addressed this question by training rats to make discriminations between sinusoidal vibrations simultaneously presented to the left and right whiskers. One set of rats learned to reliably identify which of two vibrations had higher frequency (f1 vs. f2) when amplitudes were equal. Another set of rats learned to reliably identify which of two vibrations had higher amplitude (A1 vs. A2) when frequencies were equal. Although these results indicate that both elemental features contribute to the rats{\textquoteright} sensation, a further test found that the capacity to discriminate A and f was reduced to chance when the difference in one feature was counterbalanced by the difference in the other feature: Rats could not discriminate amplitude or frequency whenever A1f1 = A2f2. Thus, vibrations were sensed as the product Af rather than as separable elemental features, A and f. The product Af is proportional to a physical entity, the mean speed. Analysis of performance revealed that rats extracted more information about differences in Af than predicted by the sum of the information in elemental differences. These behavioral experiments support the predictions of earlier physiological studies by demonstrating that rats are {\textquotedblleft}blind{\textquotedblright} to the elemental features present in a sinusoidal whisker vibration; instead, they perceive a composite feature, the speed of whisker motion.</p>},
	keywords = {barrel cortex, coding},
	doi = {10.1073/pnas.1116726109},
	author = {Mehdi Adibi and Mathew E. Diamond and Ehsan Arabzadeh}
}
