Authors:

Hannah Jordan Margulis

Date Created:

Not specified

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About Paper:

Our perception of touch is utilized every day to make decisions relevant to our functioning. We rely on texture to determine what clothes to wear or the safety of surfaces we walk on. Previous research has proven mice are able to discriminate between textures using their whiskers. However, these studies rely on head-restrained mice for neural recordings and ignore tactile information from the paws, which limits the clinical translatability of results. To address these limitations, we developed a behavioral task that allows freely-moving mice to discriminate textures through their paws. Mice were trained to walk over two different textures and report which texture is rougher by navigating to the reward port on the corresponding side. The textures consist of 16 sandpaper of varying grits as well as a smooth acrylic that acts as a baseline. We hypothesize that mice will quickly and accurately discriminate between texture pairs utilizing their paws for tactile input. These behavioral results will be later paired with neural recordings utilizing a multi-channel neural electrode array on the same behavior task to identify texture representation and discrimination thresholds in sensory brain areas. Together, this data will allow for a stronger understanding of naturalistic, mutli-feature texture encoding in the brain. Knowledge of this representation of texture information will contribute to the development of next generation prosthetics which aim to replicate the naturalistic sensation that is required for everyday functioning. Keywords: Neuroscience; Somatosensory; Texture; Neural Networks

Source:

Purdue University / 2025

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Co-authors:

Hannah Jordan Margulis