PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Francesco Mannella
AU  - Federico Maggiore
AU  - Manuel Baltieri
AU  - Giovanni Pezzulo
TI  - Active inference through whiskers
AID  - 10.1101/2021.07.16.452665
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.07.16.452665
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/07/16/2021.07.16.452665.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/07/16/2021.07.16.452665.full
AB  - Rodents use whisking to probe actively their environment and to locate objects in space, hence providing a paradigmatic biological example of active sensing. Numerous studies show that the control of whisking has anticipatory aspects. For example, rodents target their whisker protraction to the distance at which they expect objects, rather than just reacting fast to contacts with unexpected objects. Here we characterize the anticipatory control of whisking in rodents as an active inference process. In this perspective, the rodent is endowed with a prior belief that it will touch something at the end of the whisker protraction, and it continuously modulates its whisking amplitude to minimize (proprioceptive and somatosensory) prediction errors arising from an unexpected whisker-object contact, or from a lack of an expected contact. We will use the model to qualitatively reproduce key empirical findings about the ways rodents modulate their whisker amplitude during exploration and the scanning of (expected or unexpected) objects. Furthermore, we will discuss how the components of active inference model can in principle map to the neurobiological circuits of rodent whisking.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.