TY - JOUR T1 - Coding of whisker motion across the mouse face JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/402883 SP - 402883 AU - Kyle S. Severson AU - Duo Xu AU - Hongdian Yang AU - Daniel H. O’Connor Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/22/402883.abstract N2 - Haptic perception synthesizes touch with proprioception, or sense of body position. Humans and mice alike experience rich active touch of the face. Because most facial muscles lack proprioceptor endings, the sensory basis of facial proprioception remains unsolved. Facial proprioception may instead rely on mechanoreceptors that encode both touch and self-motion. In rodents, whisker mechanoreceptors provide a signal that informs the brain about whisker position. Whisking involves coordinated orofacial movements, so mechanoreceptors innervating facial regions other than whiskers could also provide information about whisking. To define all sources of sensory information about whisking available to the brain, we recorded spikes from mechanoreceptors innervating diverse parts of the face. Whisker motion was encoded best by whisker mechanoreceptors, but also by those innervating whisker pad hairy skin and supraorbital vibrissae. Redundant self-motion responses may provide the brain with a stable proprioceptive signal despite mechanical perturbations such as whisker growth and active touch.“Whiskers”macrovibrissae located on the mystacial pad.“Non-mystacial vibrissae”vibrissae that are not whiskers; includes supraorbital and genal macrovibrissae, and the microvibrissae.“Whisking” periodsFrames with θamp > 2.5° and fwhisk > 1 Hz for the tracked whisker.“Non-whisking” periodsFrames with θamp < 1° for the tracked whisker.“Whisking-sensitive”Applies to a unit with 95% confidence interval (CI) on mean spike rate during whisking in air non-overlapping with 95% CI for mean spike rate during non-whisking and with mean spike rate > 1 Hz during whisking.“Whisker afferents” or “whisker mechanoreceptors”LTMRs with single-whisker receptive fields, presumably which innervate the whisker follicle.“Proprioceptors”Mechanoreceptors presumed to associate with muscle spindle or Golgi tendon organ structures. ER -